Researchers Discover Academic Equivalent of Great Gatsby Curve in Science Mentoring

A team of economics and business researchers from Southeast University in China, University College London and Queen Mary University of London in the United Kingdom have discovered what they describe as the academic equivalent of a Great Gatsby curve in scientific mentoring.

In their article published in the Royal Society Journal InterfaceThe group describes how they studied the mentee/mentor citation histories of hundreds of thousands of academics across 22 disciplines looking for associations between mentors’ citation success and mentees’ citation success after they went freelance, and what they learned in doing so.

The Great Gatsby Curve, named after the main character in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, is now used to describe people who achieve financial success because of the environment in which they were raised. Those who grow up with a wealthy mentor tend to become wealthy adults.

In this new study, the researchers found evidence that something similar is happening in academia: Graduate students who work with an effective mentor tend to be more successful after graduation than those with less experienced mentors. In their study, they used citation counts as a measure of academic success.

Suspecting that mentoring could have a significant impact on career success, the research team devised a way to test their suspicions. They mined university databases that compared academic success among academics, then selected 245,000 mentor-mentee pairs who worked together from 2000 to 2013 to study trends. This allowed them to compare the success (number of citations) of mentees after they went into business for themselves (through 2023), who were paired with mentors with varying degrees of success.

The team found a pattern in the data: Mentees who worked with highly cited mentors tended to be cited more often over the course of their careers. They also noted that the difference was larger for graduate students than for postdocs, and that working at a prestigious institution offered some protection against these disadvantages for mentees who worked with a less-cited mentor.

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