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 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. The post Tracking Mentorship first appeared on Daily Nous.