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Academic mentees thrive in big groups, but survive in small groups

Nature Human Behaviour volume 9, pages 902–916 (2025)Cite this article

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Abstract

Mentoring is a key component of scientific achievements, contributing to overall measures of career success for mentees and mentors. Within the scientific community, possessing a large research group is often perceived as an indicator of exceptional mentorship and high-quality research. However, such large, competitive groups may also escalate dropout rates, particularly among early-career researchers. Overly high dropout rates of young researchers may lead to severe postdoc shortage and loss of top-tier academics in contemporary academia. In this context, we collect longitudinal genealogical data on mentor–mentee relations and their publications, and analyse the influence of a mentor’s group size on the future academic longevity and performance of their mentees. Our findings indicate that mentees trained in larger groups tend to exhibit superior academic performance compared with those from smaller groups, provided they remain in academia post graduation. However, we also observe two surprising patterns: academic survival rate is significantly lower for (1) mentees from larger groups and for (2) mentees with more productive mentors. The trend is verified in institutions of different prestige levels. These findings highlight a negative correlation between a mentor’s success and the academic survival rate of their mentees, prompting a rethinking of effective mentorship and offering actionable insights for career advancement.

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Fig. 1: Illustration of two academic family networks and mentor–mentee collaboration networks.
Fig. 2: Mentee count, survival rate, career length and yearly citations.
Fig. 3: Citation representation and fecundity disparity among mentees from big vs small groups.
Fig. 4: Results of coarsened exact matching regressions.
Fig. 5: Mentors’ productivity and collaboration with their mentees during the mentees’ training period.
Fig. 6: Comparison of mentees’ academic performance across institutions of varying prestige.

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Data availability

OpenAlex raw data are publicly available at https://openalex.org/ (ref. 81). OpenAlex-AFT linkage data are publicly available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4917086 (ref. 82). Those who are interested in raw data of OpenAlex should contact OpenAlex directly. The deidentified data necessary to reproduce main plots and statistical analyses are freely available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14874607 (ref. 83). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The codes used for data processing and analysis are available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14870727 (ref. 84).

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Acknowledgements

We thank all members of the Networks, Data and Society (NERDS) research group at IT University of Copenhagen, and especially M. Szell for helpful discussions. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 72274020 to A.Z., 62006109 to Y.M. and 12031005 to Y.M.) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2233200016 to A.Z.). Y.X. acknowledges support from the China Scholarship Council. R.S. and Y.X. acknowledge support from Villum Fonden through the Villum Young Investigator programme (project number: 00037394 to R.S.). R.S. also acknowledges support from Villum Fonden through the Villum Synergy programme (project number: VIL57396 to R.S.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, P.R. China

    Yanmeng Xing, Ying Fan & An Zeng

  2. Networks, Data, and Society (NERDS) Research Group, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Yanmeng Xing & Roberta Sinatra

  3. Department of Statistics and Data Science, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

    Yanmeng Xing & Yifang Ma

  4. Center for Social Data Science (SODAS), University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Roberta Sinatra

  5. Pioneer Centre for AI (P1), Copenhagen, Denmark

    Roberta Sinatra

  6. ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy

    Roberta Sinatra

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  1. Yanmeng Xing
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Contributions

Y.X. and A.Z. conceived the study. All authors contributed to the design of the study. Y.X. and Y.M. curated the datasets. Y.X., Y.F., R.S. and A.Z. performed the analysis. Y.X., R.S. and A.Z. contributed to the interpretation of the results and writing of the manuscript. R.S. was the lead writer of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Roberta Sinatra or An Zeng.

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Xing, Y., Ma, Y., Fan, Y. et al. Academic mentees thrive in big groups, but survive in small groups. Nat Hum Behav 9, 902–916 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02114-8

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