Malik Salami's Preliminary Exam
PhD candidate Malik Salami will present his dissertation proposal, "A Model to Identify and Study Mentor-Mentee Relationships in Coauthorship Networks." His preliminary examination committee includes Associate Professor Vetle I. Torvik (Chair), Associate Professor Jodi Schneider, Associate Professor Halil Kilicoglu, and Assistant Professor Nigel Bosch.
Abstract
Mentorship is a cornerstone of academic scholarship, contributing to the growth and development of mentees and mentors at all stages of their academic careers. This dissertation proposes a multi-dimensional probabilistic model to identify mentorship relationships, trained on a large-scale dataset of scientific coauthorships from an author-disambiguated version of PubMed linked to ProQuest. The model includes many predictive features, including age, author position, discipline/subject area, ethnicity, gender, funding history, discipline/subject area, institutional affiliation, publication history, and other derivative features, such as developing score measures that capture partial matching of categorical features for ethnicity and discipline matching. Although the data used for this study is retrospective, the model can help us understand various factors in mentorship formation over time and addresses critical gaps in understanding how these relationships develop. A primary application of this research is the creation of a comprehensive biomedical mentorship genealogy for over 13 million authors. This genealogy is a valuable resource for tracing the lineage of scientific ideas, studying the evolution of disciplines, evaluating mentorship's long-term impact on career trajectories, and informing evidence-based policies to strengthen academic mentorship practices.
Question? Contact Malik Salami.