Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208, USA.
Nature. 2010 Jun 3;465(7298):622-6. doi: 10.1038/nature09040.
The role of mentorship in protégé performance is a matter of importance to academic, business and governmental organizations. Although the benefits of mentorship for protégés, mentors and their organizations are apparent, the extent to which protégés mimic their mentors' career choices and acquire their mentorship skills is unclear. The importance of a science, technology, engineering and mathematics workforce to economic growth and the role of effective mentorship in maintaining a 'healthy' such workforce demand the study of the role of mentorship in academia. Here we investigate one aspect of mentor emulation by studying mentorship fecundity-the number of protégés a mentor trains-using data from the Mathematics Genealogy Project, which tracks the mentorship record of thousands of mathematicians over several centuries. We demonstrate that fecundity among academic mathematicians is correlated with other measures of academic success. We also find that the average fecundity of mentors remains stable over 60 years of recorded mentorship. We further discover three significant correlations in mentorship fecundity. First, mentors with low mentorship fecundities train protégés that go on to have mentorship fecundities 37% higher than expected. Second, in the first third of their careers, mentors with high fecundities train protégés that go on to have fecundities 29% higher than expected. Finally, in the last third of their careers, mentors with high fecundities train protégés that go on to have fecundities 31% lower than expected.
导师制对学术、商业和政府组织的重要性。尽管导师制对受导者、导师和他们的组织有明显的好处，但受导者在多大程度上模仿导师的职业选择并获得导师的指导技能尚不清楚。科学、技术、工程和数学劳动力对经济增长的重要性，以及有效的导师制在维持“健康”劳动力方面的作用，都要求我们研究导师制在学术界中的作用。在这里，我们通过研究导师的繁殖力（即导师培训的受导者数量）来研究导师的模仿的一个方面，使用来自数学家谱项目的数据，该项目跟踪了几个世纪以来数千名数学家的导师记录。我们证明，学术数学家的繁殖力与其他学术成功的衡量标准相关。我们还发现，在记录的 60 多年导师制中，导师的平均繁殖力保持稳定。我们还发现导师的繁殖力有三个显著的相关性。首先，繁殖力低的导师培训的受导者的繁殖力比预期高出 37%。其次，在职业生涯的前三分之一，繁殖力高的导师培训的受导者的繁殖力比预期高出 29%。最后，在职业生涯的最后三分之一，繁殖力高的导师培训的受导者的繁殖力比预期低 31%。
