You can’t measure a mentor solely by gender

Nobody is perfect. If you think you are, I’d suggest your flaw is in your ability to self-reflect. Mentors, however, can guide you a little closer to your ideal version of you, providing you with the support and tools you need to achieve your goals, whatever they may be.

But mentors are imperfect people too. Striving to find ways that could make the support they provide more effective is therefore a worthwhile mission. Unfortunately, while a paper recently published in Nature Communications appears to be motivated by this aim, it dramatically misses the target.

The study looked at author lists of scientific papers to identify 3 million mentor-protégé pairs. By looking at the citation counts of the ‘protégés’, the researchers performing the study have drawn some conclusions about how successful that ‘mentoring’ relationship was. If you think that sounds questionable even from that brief description, you’re not alone – threads criticising the paper abound on Twitter. Even the peer review reports, available in the paper’s supplementary information, show that most of the reviewers had serious concerns with both the methodology used in the study and the conclusions drawn.