The Great Gatsby Academic Curve

Perhaps one of the most famous heroes in Western literature who rose from the bottom is Jay Gatsby Scott Fitzgerald. There was even a famous curve named after him, which shows the connection between economic inequality and intergenerational mobility. It is expected that the higher the economic inequality, the more strongly the income of parents influences the future income of their offspring. However, this is a completely different story.

As it turns out, the Great Gatsby curve exists not only in economics, but also in academia. One recent study on the topic analyzed the academic performance of 245,000 mentor-mentee pairs based on their citation rates. The researchers took the period from 2000 to 2013, during which time these pairs wrote a total of 10 million articles in 22 different disciplines. By studying citation rates over the next five years after entering an independent academic career, the researchers found that the high citation rates of mentors were passed on to their mentees. Simply put, if your supervisor had a high article citation index, then yours will be higher. The converse is also true.

The researchers called their discovery the “Great Gatsby Academic Curve,” which they carefully dissected. It turns out that “citation inequality,” as the authors call it, is most common in—who would have thought? — humanities, especially philosophy. Thus, if we measure citation inequality on a scale from 0 to 1, then in philosophy this indicator is 0.82, and in anthropology and pedagogy – 0.79. The achievements of mentors have less influence in the technical sciences, although not without exceptions. Finally, in the natural sciences, citation inequality influenced by mentor authority is minimal. Biologists have something to be proud of.

Also, Gatsby's academic curve partly depends on the gender of his academic advisor. If your academic teacher is a woman, her academic success is more likely to be inherited by you. At the same time, in more prestigious academic institutions the curve is less pronounced than in less well-known universities. And the ones who best inherit the successes of their mentors are their “course students,” while junior researchers who clean test tubes in laboratories receive the least from collaborating with a famous academician in terms of their future scientific career.

Such conclusions are not a big secret for residents of a country where 70% of the population has higher education (academic or other advanced courses in their specialty). What's more interesting is that this study shows us the problem on a global scale, once again demonstrating that your neighbor's grass is not necessarily greener.

Author: Fedor Yakovlev

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