Are scientometric profiles hereditary? Analyzing scholarly practices of doctoral advisors and advisees in the social sciences

Doctoral mentoring plays an important role in the professional development and career trajectories of doctoral students, although little research exists quantifying the relationship between the scholarly practice and performance of doctoral advisees and their advisors. This dissertation proposes a set of analyses that explore the relationship between doctoral advisees and advisors in terms of their scholarly practice and performance---including publication, collaboration and citation patterns---based on massive and heterogeneous data sources. Economics, Political Science and Sociology are selected for the purpose of illustrating these relationships in the social sciences. Results show that advisees are more likely to learn from their advisors by imitating those aspects of scientometric profiles that are directly transferable, such as reference and collaboration patterns. For aspects that rely more on individual endeavor of advisees and where they exert less control, advisees are less likely to inherit from their advisors. Although disciplines investigated in this study show the general pattern mentioned above, the strength to which advisors and advisees are related in each aspect of scientometric profiles varies significantly among Economics, Political Science and Sociology. This study is unique in proposing a framework for analyzing the relationship between the scientometric profiles of advisors and advisees at a large scale and should shed light on future research regarding doctoral mentoring and intellectual capital reproduction of disciplines.