Mentorship and protege success in STEM fields

Einstein believed that mentors are especially influential in a protege's intellectual development, yet the link between mentorship and protege success remains a mystery. We marshaled genealogical data on nearly 40,000 scientists who published 1,167,518 papers in biomedicine, chemistry, math, or physics between 1960 and 2017 to investigate the relationship between mentorship and protege achievement. In our data, we find groupings of mentors with similar records and reputations who attracted proteges of similar talents and expected levels of professional success. However, each grouping has an exception: One mentor has an additional hidden capability that can be mentored to their proteges. They display skill in creating and communicating prizewinning research. Because the mentor's ability for creating and communicating celebrated research existed before the prize's conferment, proteges of future prizewinning mentors can be uniquely exposed to mentorship for conducting celebrated research. Our models explain 34-44% of the variance in protege success and reveals three main findings. First, mentorship strongly predicts protege success across diverse disciplines. Mentorship is associated with a 2x-to4x rise in a protege's likelihood of prizewinning, National Academy of Science (NAS) induction, or superstardom relative to matched proteges. Second, mentorship is significantly associated with an increase in the probability of proteges pioneering their own research topics and being midcareer late bloomers. Third, contrary to conventional thought, proteges do not succeed most by following their mentors' research topics but by studying original topics and coauthoring no more than a small fraction of papers with their mentors.