In academia, nepotism has been blamed for poor graduate career support, gender inequality, and emigration of the intelligentsia. To support this idea Allesina[1] reported an unnatural scarcity of distinct surnames among tenured faculties in Italy while Ferlazzo and Sdoia[2] repeated the same analysis among professors in the United Kingdom, sustaining a more objective expression of social capital. Albeit with very careful consideration of surnames' distributions and flows across regions and time periods, surname clustering can be used to reflect family ties or kinship, and interpreted in relation to measures of social capital (including corruption, income inequality, and scientific output).
In this seminar I will represent the analysis of surname patterns in the health science literature, by country, across five decades[3]. Over 21 million papers indexed in the MEDLINE/PubMed database were analyzed. We identified relevant country-specific kinship trends over time and found that authors who are part of a kin tend to occupy central positions in their collaborative networks. Just as kin build potent academic networks with their own resources, societies may do well to provide equivalent support for talented individuals with fewer resources, on the periphery of networks.
[1] S. Allesina, PloS one 6, e21160 (2011).
[2] F. Ferlazzo, S. Sdoia, PLoS One 7, e43574 (2012).
[3] M.C.F. Prosperi, et al., PNAS 113(32), 8957-8962 (2016).
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