The Impact of Mentorship on Scholarship Behaviour in LIS

The goal of this project is to understand what impact the mentor-mentee relationship has on the future publication patterns of LIS doctoral students in North America.

Related questions we hope to answer are:

  1. How closely related is the subject matter of a mentor’s scholarship/area of expertise and the mentee’s dissertation during the doctoral process?

  2. Do the publishing behaviors (impact, frequency) of the mentor influence the mentee’s publication patterns as they progress through their academic career?

  3. Does the mentor’s subject of expertise influence the mentee’s future publication subject area or does it tend to deviate in a multidisciplinary field like LIS?

  4. What implications might the mentor-mentee relationship have on the academic network of a student; do students of the same mentor tend to publish together/in the same subject area?