# The academic Great Gatsby Curve

**Authors:** Ye Sun, Fabio Caccioli, Xiancheng Li, Giacomo Livan  
**arXiv:** [2310.08968](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.08968)  
**Date:** 2023-10-13  
**Summary page:** https://www.summarizepaper.com/en/paper/2310.08968v1/

## Key points

- Study examines relationship between income inequality and intergenerational income persistence in academic field
- Researchers analyze temporal trends of academic persistence between mentors and mentees using genealogical data from over 300,000 academics and their papers
- Different types of mentorship, gender combinations, and institutional prestige are compared
- Academic impact is quantified by calculating aggregated impact of mentors and mentees through citations received by their papers
- Higher rank-rank correlation indicates higher intergenerational persistence of scientific impact
- Results show significant upward trend in rank-rank correlations over subsequent mentor-mentee cohorts, suggesting increasing trajectory of persistence
- Early-career researchers' academic impact increasingly influenced by prominence and reputation of supervisors or collaborators
- Additional analyses support positive relationship between academic impact inequality and academic intergenerational persistence
- Study provides insights into academic persistence across various dimensions such as mentorship types, gender combinations, and institutional prestige

## Summary

The study examines the relationship between income inequality and intergenerational income persistence, known as the Great Gatsby Curve, in the academic field. Using genealogical data from over 300,000 academics and their nearly 10 million papers published across 22 disciplines from 2000 to 2013, the researchers analyze the temporal trends of academic persistence between mentors and their mentees. They also compare these trends across different types of mentorship, different gender combinations of mentors and mentees, and different tiers of institutional prestige. To quantify academic impact, the researchers calculate the aggregated impact of mentors and mentees within a 5-year time window before and after their final mentorship year. This is done by summing up the citations received by their papers published during this period. The Spearman rank correlation coefficients are then calculated to measure the similarity between mentors' and mentees' positions in their discipline's impact rankings. The higher the rank-rank correlation, the higher the intergenerational persistence of scientific impact. The results show a significant upward trend in rank-rank correlations over subsequent mentor-mentee cohorts, indicating an increasing trajectory of persistence. This suggests that mentees have become more likely to share similar positions in their discipline's impact ranking as their mentors over time. This finding aligns with previous observations that early-career researchers' academic impact is increasingly influenced by the prominence and reputation of supervisors or collaborators. To ensure robustness, additional analyses were conducted using normalized citations over time and disciplines as well as measuring Pearson correlations between logarithmic impacts of mentors and mentees. These analyses consistently support the conclusion that there is a positive relationship between academic impact inequality and academic intergenerational persistence. Overall, this study provides detailed insights into academic persistence across various dimensions such as mentorship types, gender combinations, and institutional prestige. It confirms the existence of an academic Great Gatsby Curve in which there is a positive correlation between academic impact inequality and the persistence of impact across academic generations.