gm-index: a new mentorship index for researchers

Advisor–advisee relationships in academic genealogy offer opportunities to understand the contribution of a mentor in shaping the research community. In this paper, we adapt the bibliometric g -index to study the mentorship role of a researcher. We call the new index g m -index. It has some importan...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientometrics 2020, Vol.123 (1), p.71-102
Main Authors: Sanyal, Debarshi Kumar, Dey, Sumana, Das, Partha Pratim
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bibliometrics
Computer Science
Correlation analysis
Family trees
Genealogy
Information Storage and Retrieval
Library Science
Mentors
Researchers
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Advisor–advisee relationships in academic genealogy offer opportunities to understand the contribution of a mentor in shaping the research community. In this paper, we adapt the bibliometric g -index to study the mentorship role of a researcher. We call the new index g m -index. It has some important differences from the mentorship h -index or the h m -index. We compute the values of the h m and g m indices for researchers indexed in the Mathematics Genealogy Project and the Academic Family Tree. We observe for the majority of researchers, these index values are zero, but in non-zero cases, sometimes, the g m -index can be significantly higher than the h m -index. Moreover, the g m -index decays less rapidly to zero than the h m -index. It appears the g m -index can be used to discriminate between researchers with the same h m -index. We study how these mentorship indices are correlated with other indicators of academic success, and how they are correlated across generations of researchers.
ISSN:0138-9130
1588-2861
DOI:10.1007/s11192-020-03384-x