The association between early career informal mentorship in academic collaborations and junior author performance

Abstract

We study mentorship in scientific collaborations, where a junior scientist is supported by potentially multiple senior collaborators, without them necessarily having formal supervisory roles. We identify 3 million mentor-protégé pairs and survey a random sample, verifying that their relationship involved some form of mentorship. We find that mentorship quality predicts the scientific impact of the papers written by protégés post mentorship without their mentors. We also find that increasing the proportion of female mentors is associated not only with a reduction in post-mentorship impact of female protégés, but also a reduction in the gain of female mentors. While current diversity policies encourage same-gender mentorships to retain women in academia, our findings raise the possibility that opposite-gender mentorship may actually increase the impact of women who pursue a scientific career. These findings add a new perspective to the policy debate on how to best elevate the status of women in science.

Fig. 1. Survey outcome.

Responses of 167 randomly-chosen scientists who were identified as protégés and asked about their relationship to a scientist who was identified as one of their mentors. a Distributions of the responses to each of five statements regarding their senior collaborator, where the statements take the form “I received advice from him/her about...” followed by five different skills: (i) writing; (ii) research study/design; (iii) data analysis/modeling; (iv) addressing reviewer comments; (v) selecting a venue for publication. b A different way of summarizing the responses in a, showing the proportion of participants who either agree or strongly agree to at least x out of the five statements regarding their senior collaborator, where x ∈ {1, …, 5}. c The percentage of protégés who selected true for each of the following four statements regarding their senior collaborator: (i) I received grant writing advice from him/her; (ii) I received a letter of recommendation from him/her for a fellowship/award or job application; (iii) I received career planning advice from him/her; (iv) He/she put me in touch with an important person in my field. d A different way of summarizing the responses in c, showing the proportion of participants who have selected true to at least x out of the four statements regarding their senior collaborator, where x ∈ {1, …, 4}. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

Fig. 2. The big-shot experience and hub experience of 3 million mentor–protégé pairs.

For every independent variable, be it big-shot experience or hub experience, Q_i denotes the ith quintile of the distribution of that variable. For i ∈ {1, 2, 3, 4}, we consider Q_i+1 and Q_i to be the treatment and control groups, respectively, and write Q_i+1 vs. Q_i when referring to the CEM used to compare these two groups. The color of the bar indicates whether the independent variable is the big-shot experience (purple) or the hub experience (yellow), whereas the height of the bar equals δ, which is the increase in the average post-mentorship impact of the treatment group relative to that of the control group. A t-test shows that the values of δ are all statistically significant; see the corresponding p-values in Supplementary Tables 2 and 3. Since scientific impact is sensitive to external values, we bootstrap a 95% confidence interval. The error bars represent the 95% confidence interval. ***p < 0.001, **p < 0.01, *p < 0.05. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

Fig. 3. The relationship between gender and the gain from mentorship.

a F_i denotes the set of protégés from our 3 million pairs that have exactly i female mentors. Focusing on male protégés, F_i vs. F₀: i = 1, …, 5 refers to the change in the average post-mentorship impact of protégés in F_i relative to the average post-mentorship impact of those in F₀ while controlling for the protégé’s big-shot experience, number of mentors, discipline, affiliation rank, and the year in which they published their first mentored paper. A t-test is used to show the that values are all satistically significant; see the corresponding p-values in Supplementary Table 24. b The same as a but for female protégés instead of male protégés. c The gain of a mentor when mentoring a particular protégé is measured as the average impact (〈c₅〉) of the papers they authored with that protégé during the mentorship period. While controlling for the protégé’s discipline, affiliation rank, number of mentors, and the year in which they published their first mentored paper, the figure depicts the change in the mentor’s average gain when mentoring a female protégé relative to that when mentoring a male protégé; results are presented for female mentors and male mentors separately. A t-test shows that the values are all statistically significant. Since scientific impact is sensitive to external values, we bootstrap a 95% confidence interval. The error bars represent the 95% confidence interval. *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, ***p < 0.001. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.