Advisor–Advisee Research Overlap and Its Implications for Scientists’ Early-Career Performance in the United States

A genealogical training process, in which senior (advisor) scientists mentor and train junior (advisee) scientists is one of the core organizational features of modern science. In this paper, we examine a key question faced by all junior scientists during their training: What impact does an advisee’s research agenda overlap with his or her advisor have on the advisee’s career-relevant performance outcomes? To answer this question, we constructed a novel, bibliometric-record-based data set on 11,289 U.S. biomedical scientists (advisees) who were trained in 5,632 principal investigator advisors’ labs between 1985 and 2009. We examined the relationship between advisor–advisee research overlap and an array of performance outcomes for emerging scientists, revealing a consistently positive relationship between high advisor–advisee research overlap and the junior scientist’s early-career funding outcomes. We further provide evidence that this positive relationship rests upon enhanced tacit knowledge transfer, as well as providing suggestive evidence for the boundary conditions of an intellectual independence imperative and potential competition between advisors and advisees. Taken together, these findings provide a more complete understanding of how advisor–advisee relationships shape new scientists’ performance during their early careers. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17601 .