The role of mentorship in protégé performance

Malmgren, R. Dean; Ottino, Julio M.; Amaral, Luı́s A. Nunes

doi:10.1038/nature09040

Cited by 149 publications

(139 citation statements)

References 25 publications

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“…The pattern may even extend to mentorship, supported by a finding that the protégés of early-career mathematicians tended to mentor more students, themselves, than protégés trained by those same faculty late in their careers [15]. In fact, this conventional narrative of the life course is not restricted to academia, with similar trajectories observed in criminal behavior and artistic production in 1800s France [16] and even productivity of food acquisition by huntergatherers [17].While these past studies have firmly established that the conventional academic productivity narrative is equally descriptive across fields and time, their analyses are based on averages over hundreds or thousands of individuals [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][13][14][15][16][17]. This raises two crucial and previously unanswered questions: is this average trajectory representative of individual faculty, and how much diversity is hidden by a focus on a central tendency over a population?…”

mentioning

confidence: 60%

The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory

Way

Morgan

Clauset

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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A scientist may publish tens or hundreds of papers over a career, but these contributions are not evenly spaced in time. Sixty years of studies on career productivity patterns in a variety of fields suggest an intuitive and universal pattern: productivity tends to rise rapidly to an early peak and then gradually declines. Here, we test the universality of this conventional narrative by analyzing the structures of individual faculty productivity time series, constructed from over 200,000 publications and matched with hiring data for 2453 tenure-track faculty in all 205 Ph.D-granting computer science departments in the U.S. and Canada. Unlike prior studies, which considered only some faculty or some institutions, or lacked common career reference points, here we combine a large bibliographic dataset with comprehensive information on career transitions that covers an entire field of study. We show that the conventional narrative confidently describes only one fifth of faculty, regardless of department prestige or researcher gender, and the remaining four fifths of faculty exhibit a rich diversity of productivity patterns. To explain this diversity, we introduce a simple model of productivity trajectories, and explore correlations between its parameters and researcher covariates, showing that departmental prestige predicts overall individual productivity and the timing of the transition from first-to last-author publications. These results demonstrate the unpredictability of productivity over time, and open the door for new efforts to understand how environmental and individual factors shape scientific productivity. INTRODUCTIONScholarly publications serve as the primary mode of communication through which scientific knowledge is developed, discussed, and disseminated. The amount that an individual researcher contributes to this dialoguetheir scholarly productivity-thus serves as an important measure of the rate at which they contribute units of knowledge to the field, and this measure is known to influence the placement of graduates into faculty jobs [1], the likelihood of being granted tenure [2,3], and the ability to secure funding for future research [4].The trajectory of productivity over the course of a researcher's lifetime has been studied for at least 60 years, with the common observation being that a researcher's productivity rises rapidly to a peak and then slowly declines [5][6][7][8][9], which has inspired the construction of mechanistic models with a similar profile [7,[9][10][11][12]. These models have included factors like cognitive decline with age, career age, finite supplies of human capital, knowledge advantages conferred by recent education, as well as skill deficits among the young, among others, and have been supported by the observation that individual productivity curves feature both long-and medium-term fluctuations [12] and are not well described by even fourth-degree polynomial models [9]. Indeed, every study we found to date proposes or confirms a * samuel.way@colorado.edu † allison.morg...

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mentioning

confidence: 60%

The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory

Way

Morgan

Clauset

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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“…Resulta interesante mencionar el espacio que en los últimos años ha ganado, especialmente en las sociedades médicas anglosajonas, la concepción del "mentor". Esta idea se basa en que, además del equipo for- mativo, la presencia de un profesor permanente y productivo a lo largo del trayecto instruccional augura una mayor calidad de la formación y productividad asociada 19 . Esta fórmula debería ser evaluada a la luz de las opiniones de los residentes que consideran que la calidad y dedicación de los profesores deben ser mejoradas 20 .…”

Section: Discussionunclassified

Intención y desarrollo de competencias en investigación clínica en programas de postítulo de médico especialista en Chile

Concha

Vergara

et al. 2012

Rev. méd. Chile

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“…With the realization among world leaders that economic competitiveness and development in the 21st century very much depend on having a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics-(STEM-) competent workforce, scientific training, and mentoring have received increased attention in the last few years [1]. In the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), along with other federal agencies, have instituted new policies and introduced aggressive strategies on how to train future scientists.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Likewise, NIH has issued a statement clarifying that its grantees dedicate a significant portion of their time to mentoring [3]. Malmgren et al [1] contend that the production and maintenance of such a STEM-competent workforce demands the systematic study of mentoring in the context of doctoral science education. However, despite the efforts of the academic community to improve mentoring in doctoral science programs, there is still a paucity of studies that examines the actual mentoring practices and research experiences that assist the production of future scientists and how these same practices and experiences impact scientific outcomes-specifically written research productivity.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Research experiences and mentoring practices in selected east asian graduate programs: Predictors of research productivity among doctoral students in molecular biology

Ynalvez

Garza‐Gongora

Ynalvez

et al. 2014

Biochem Molecular Bio Educ

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Although doctoral mentors recognize the benefits of providing quality advisement and close guidance, those of sharing project management responsibilities with mentees are still not well recognized. We observed that mentees, who have the opportunity to co-manage projects, generate more written output. Here we examine the link between research productivity, doctoral mentoring practices (DMP), and doctoral research experiences (DRE) of mentees in programs in the non-West. Inspired by previous findings that early career productivity is a strong predictor of later productivity, we examine the research productivity of 210 molecular biology doctoral students in selected programs in Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. Using principal component (PC) analysis, we derive two sets of PCs: one set from 15 DMP and another set from 16 DRE items. We model research productivity using Poisson and negativebinomial regression models with these sets as predictors. Our findings suggest a need to re-think extant practices and to allocate resources toward professional career development in training future scientists. We contend that doctoral science training must not only be an occasion for future scientists to learn scientific and technical skills, but it must also be the opportunity to experience, to acquire, and to hone research management skills. V C 2014 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 42(4):305-322, 2014.

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The role of mentorship in protégé performance

Cited by 149 publications

References 25 publications

The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory

The misleading narrative of the canonical faculty productivity trajectory

Intención y desarrollo de competencias en investigación clínica en programas de postítulo de médico especialista en Chile

Research experiences and mentoring practices in selected east asian graduate programs: Predictors of research productivity among doctoral students in molecular biology

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