Tracking Mentorship
The “Mentorship Index Calculator” is now live. What is it?
The Mentorship Index (M-index) measures a scientist’s contribution to mentoring junior scientists. The M-index counts the number of publications for which the scientist served as last author (typically indicating the senior/mentoring role) where the first author (typically the mentee who led the work) was relatively new to science (proxied by the number of publications associated with their name at that time). For example, the M10-index is the number of last-author publications where the first author had fewer than 10 publications at the time.
Great idea.
Here’s what it looks like:
The Mentorship Index Calculator, developed by Jean Fan
The index and calculator were created by Jean Fan, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University. It uses the Open Alex database as its reference source.
You can try out the calculator here.
Given how it works, the Mentorship Index will be a more useful, if limited, measure of one’s mentorship in fields in which co-authoring is more common—the sciences, as opposed to philosophy. But there are some philosophers included among the “scientists” the M-index Calculator can report on.
That said, one should be cautious about the results. I typed in the names of several philosophers who had co-authored a fair amount to get their M-Indexes. Some did not show up at all. Some share names with other scientists, and so they end up getting credit for mentoring via articles they actually did not write. In some cases, articles appear to be double-counted. And in one case, after typing in a philosopher’s name and hitting enter, the calculator repeatedly changed the name to someone else’s and gave me the results for this other person. So there are some bugs; with luck they will get fixed.
In the meanwhile, alternate suggestions for tracking mentorship in philosophy would be welcome.
Leaving aside that this would be useless in philosophy as there is not only comparatively a vanishingly small number of co-authored works and there is no settled norm in philosophy about author ordering which this relies on entirely (is there really such norms in science?). I’ve seen senior people have their name first in philosophy, or last, normally just due to alphabetical ordering reasons…
All that left aside, this sounds good initially but of course it does not really do what we need which is to track good mentors. Talk to any junior person in a scientific field and you’ll hear first or second hand stories about senior mentors that demand their name on papers despite being no help to the writing of the paper, or even being detrimental to it. Bad mentors will co-author papers with the people working under them at the same rate as good mentors, so I think we would have to be extremely sceptical about any results from this sort of database. Not to say it is useless, but just that it doesn’t really track what it claims to and if this starts getting used for official purposes, I worry it will reward many bad mentors in the sciences that take advantage of the junior people around them.
Different sciences do have different norms. But in most of the lab sciences, it is pretty standard for the senior author(s) to go last, and for the grad student who ran the experiments to go first, though I don’t know what the conventions are for middle authors.
In math, it is pretty standard for authors to be listed entirely alphabetically. In economics, I believe it is standard for authors to randomize the ordering.
I don’t know if there is a standard in philosophy, but I think all my papers have been purely alphabetical lists, apart from one statistics paper (more of a manifesto) with 72 authors, where the 5 lead authors were alphabetical at the beginning of the list, and everyone else was alphabetical afterwards.
But regardless of these inter-field standards, I suspect you’re right that this particular way of calculating the index isn’t really going to be helpful in many fields. In the lab science fields that I’m aware of, basically every paper has a first author who has fewer than 10 total publications, so this ends up just being a count of how many papers this person is senior author on.
But perhaps in biomedical engineering, there are some senior scientists who don’t take grad students, and instead mostly run their lab with postdocs and staff scientists? That doesn’t sound like a financially viable way to run a lab in chemistry or physics, but I’ve heard that biologists tend to take a lot more postdocs, so maybe it works there.
I don’t think this is a useful measure of mentorship in philosophy or outside it. Senior author means ‘lab head’ or ‘procurer of funding’ much more reliably than it means ‘mentor’. Of course ‘lab head’ and ‘mentor’ are often correlated, but far from always.
The scientist who proposed this new measure should have done his homework. There already is an m-index. It is a variant of the h-index but takes into account the number of years in which a researcher has been publishing. Thus,
A scientist’s m-index = the scientist’s h-index divided by the number of years since their first publication.
Most people should leave bibliometrics and scientometrics to the specialists who know what they are doing.
She might have done better to look up existing terminology and come up with a different name for her metric. But I don’t think it’s a good thing for practitioners to stay out of the study of their field, the way you seem to be advocating.
As a first step, it would be great if all Graduate Programs in Philosophy took responsibility for adding the names of those who have completed their Program with the PhD to Philosophy Tree, a branch of the Academic Family Tree. You can learn quite a lot about a philosopher by learning about their PhD advising. Of course, you can mentor without being a PhD advisor. But since being a PhD advisor is in part mentoring, knowledge of PhD advising is a useful proxy.
Michael
Can you post your e-mail? I am on the tree but my entry is incomplete. Someone added me. What is there is accurate, but incomplete. Thanks
https://philosophy.princeton.edu/people/michael-smith