Advisor-Advisee Research Overlap and Its Implications for Scientists’ Early-Career Funding Performance

A genealogical training process, in which senior (advisor) scientists engage in the cross-generational transfer of skills and knowledge to junior (advisee) scientists is a core facet of modern science. In this paper, we examine the consequences of a core tension faced by all junior scientists: to build upon an advisor’s skills or to strike out on one’s own? We apply a status-based lens to explain whether high-status advisors exude a greater (or lesser) competitive intensity with respect to their advisees when there is high advisor-advisee research overlap. We study the implications of advisee-advisor research overlap for the emerging scientists’ funding performance by constructing a novel dataset on 26,591 U.S. biomedical scientists (advisees) who were trained under 17,373 PI advisors’ labs between 1972 and 2009. We deploy a difference-in-difference strategy where advisor scientists who experienced a status shock were matched to similar advisors who did not experience the shock. By comparing advisees who left the advisor, pre- and post- status shock, to the advisees of those matched-sample advisors who never experienced a shock, we find evidence for status-based competitive exclusion: the benefits an advisee derives from having similar research to the advisor’s is reduced as the advisor’s status increases. We corroborate these results with a full-sample analysis where we further demonstrate that the competitive exclusion effect is accentuated in more mature scientific fields and in less crowded scientific fields. Taken together, these findings provide a more complete understanding of how advisor-advisee relationships shape new scientists’ funding performance during their careers