In 2020, I drew attention on my first blog to a study in Nature Communications showing that early coauthorship with leading scientists predicts a competitive advantage extending throughout a researcher’s subsequent career, with the uncomfortable implication that the scientific standing of those with whom young researchers work can profoundly shape their future prospects long after their initial scientific training ends. In 2024, I returned to this issue, discussing research published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface across 22 scientific disciplines, which identified an increasing association between the scientific impact of mentors and that of their protégés.
My current analysis of several leading universities places ETH Zurich at 99.8 researchers listed in the Elsevier–Stanford scientists ranking per 100 faculty members, a benchmark that confronts universities with a conspicuously low representation of highly cited researchers with a question their promotional rhetoric cannot honestly answer: Should they be required to disclose prospective supervisors’ scientific records and explicitly warn doctoral applicants that a supervisor’s weak scientific standing may seriusly compromise their career prospects, restrict their international visibility and curtail their access to influential scientific networks?
Universities that demand years of intellectual labour while proclaiming their excellence should substantiate that promise with their supervisors’ scientific records, enabling applicants to distinguish genuine research achievement from academic titles that too often shelter entrenched scientific mediocrity. Doctoral candidates inherit more than a dissertation topic: they inherit their supervisors’ networks, reputations and sense of what is possible. They deserve to know whether they are receiving an inheritance worth building on or a crippling debt they may spend their careers trying to escape.
