There is significant anecdotal testimony that attests to the importance of mentoring. Most successful scientists openly acknowledge that navigating the complex terrain of academic science is much riskier without the guidance of an experienced mentor. Mentoring guides published by the National Academy of Sciences, the Association for Women in Science, and other professional societies rest on the unquestioned premise that mentoring is essential. How would you go about quantitating the value of mentoring? Is it even reasonable to try to measure what is in essence a very personal, informal, and somewhat intangible relationship? However, I was confident that somewhere, in one of the many mentoring books on my shelves, there was the data she needed.
Among the books I pulled down was Fair Science by Jonathan Cole, published by The Free Press in 1979. Cole crunched a substantial amount of data. Included in his analysis was the development of quantitative ...
