To what extent does academic success follow success? Drawing on a dataset of mentor-mentee relations and their citations, Ye Sun, Fabio Caccioli, Xiancheng Li and Giacomo Livan suggest the dynamics of citation and wealth inequality are surprisingly similar.
Rankings are ubiquitous: every week, lists of best-selling records, movies, and books are released, and in sports like tennis, athletes are ranked based on their performance in major tournaments. While we know there is more to a song, book, or movie than its sales figures, we are drawn to rankings because they simplify complexity. They reduce a multidimensional concept like success into simple ordered lists.
In academia, citation-based metrics have come to serve a similar function. With platforms like Clarivate and Google Scholar, measuring an author’s performance through citations has become a common practice, whether we like it or not. In some countries, these bibliometric indicators have even started to dictate career progression, making citations an informal currency of success.
In this context, it is useful to consider what determines academic success. Natural abilities certainly matter. Personal attributes such as intelligence, diligence, and a strong work ethic are crucial. But does nurture play a role as well? Research suggests it does. Recent studies have shown that early-career collaborations with highly-cited scientists increase the likelihood of becoming a highly-cited author, even two decades later. These studies have also documented the “chaperone effect,” where publishing in high-impact journals is facilitated by co-authors who have already established themselves in those venues.
Natural abilities certainly matter. Personal attributes such as intelligence, diligence, and a strong work ethic are crucial. But does nurture play a role as well?
This brings us to a critical question: Can academic success be inherited in a way similar to wealth and social status? In a recent paper, we sought to address this question by analysing the transfer of success from mentors to mentees in academia. In economics, the Great Gatsby Curve describes a negative correlation between income inequality (measured, for example, by the Gini coefficient) and intergenerational social mobility. In other words, the more unequal a society’s income distribution, the harder it is for individuals to move up the social ladder compared to their parents’ social class.
Drawing on this concept, we analysed genealogical data from over 245,000 mentor-mentee pairs across 22 different disciplines. Our findings reveal a similar pattern in academia: the more unequal the distribution of citations within a discipline, the more likely a mentee’s citation ranking is to mirror their mentor’s. This suggests that academic success is shaped by structural forces similar to those that govern social mobility, where the advantage of having a top mentor can lead to a self-reinforcing cycle of success.
This relationship is illustrated in the figure one below. The horizontal axis represents citation inequality across various disciplines. We observe that fields such as experimental psychology, microbiology, and evolutionary biology exhibit the most egalitarian citation distribution, while philosophy, education, and anthropology display the highest levels of inequality. The vertical axis captures intergenerational ranking persistence, where disciplines like microbiology, cell biology, and bioengineering show the weakest correlation between the citation ranking of mentors and mentees. In contrast, in some liberal arts and medical fields, such as philosophy, linguistics, and epidemiology, ranking persistence across academic generations is notably strong.
Fig.1: The academic Great Gatsby curve showing varying inherited citation inequality across different disciplines.
In everyday life, parents and children do not choose each other, whereas in academia, mentors and mentees actively select one another. This mutual selection means that top mentors often attract top mentees, and vice versa, leading naturally to lower mobility across generations within the citation distribution. While this makes some degree of inheritance and persistence expected, our findings go beyond merely showing that mentors matter. We document not only a decrease in mobility across generations over time, but also a clear negative correlation between mobility and citation inequality—an exact mirror of patterns observed in wealth inequality in wider society.
our findings go beyond merely showing that mentors matter
These findings do not imply that mentees who inherit top-ranking positions are undeserving of their status. On the contrary, they likely had an initial advantage over their peers, which allowed them to gain access to top mentors in the first place. From these mentors, they acquired valuable skills that further widened the gap between them and others. This is similar to the much debated example of hockey players popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers. There is an overrepresentation of Canadian professional hockey players born in January and February because youth leagues group players by birth year. Being born early in the year gives these children a physical development edge, which leads to their selection for better teams and training. Over time, this initial advantage compounds, and they ultimately become much stronger players than their peers.
If anything, our results suggest that citation-based metrics should be handled with caution, as the story behind these numbers is more nuanced than it appears at first glance. Additionally, promoting geographical and institutional mobility could help unlock untapped potential by providing broader access to top-cited mentors. Concrete measures such as cross-institution mentorship programs or incentives for top scholars to engage with early-career researchers outside their immediate networks could foster greater academic equity and help reduce the persistent disparities highlighted by our study.
This post draws on the authors’ article, The academic Great Gatsby Curve published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface
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