Academic Support Network Reflects Doctoral Experience and Productivity

TL;DR

This study analyzes doctoral students' acknowledgments to reveal how academic support networks differ by gender and discipline, and how these networks relate to productivity and institutional rankings.

Contribution

It introduces a novel textual analysis of acknowledgments to map academic support networks and links these networks to productivity and institutional factors.

Findings

Academic support networks are categorized into five communities.

Number of academic acknowledgments correlates with productivity.

Institutional rankings relate to support network size and productivity.

Abstract

Current practices of quantifying performance by productivity leads serious concerns for psychological well-being of doctoral students and influence of research environment is often neglected in research evaluations. Acknowledgements in dissertations reflect the student experience and provide an opportunity to thank the people who support them. We conduct textual analysis of acknowledgments to build the "academic support network," uncovering five distinct communities: Academic, Administration, Family, Friends & Colleagues, and Spiritual; each of which is acknowledged differently by genders and disciplines. Female students mention fewer people from each community except for their families and total number of people mentioned in acknowledgements allows disciplines to be categorized as either individual science or team science. We also show that number of people mentioned from academic community is positively correlated with productivity and institutional rankings are found to be correlated with productivity and size of academic support networks but show no effect on students' sentiment on acknowledgements. Our results indicate the importance of academic support networks by explaining how they differ and how they influence productivity.