Genealogical academic inbreeding and its effect on performance: Evidence for scientists at Dutch universities (1815–1943)
研究了荷兰大学1815–1943年间473名科学家的谱系学术近亲繁殖对七项绩效指标的影响，发现近亲繁殖在学术运动早期阶段能提升绩效。
Most view academic inbreeding as detrimental to academic careers. We argue that the effects of inbreeding on individual careers depend on the stage of the lifecycle of local research programs at universities. We propose a new ‘genealogical’ view whereby scientists are considered ‘inbred’ if their PhD was supervised by a professor who holds a PhD from the same university and within the same discipline. We can then measure ‘genealogical academic inbreeding’ by reconstructing the number of generations of inbreds preceding an individual scholar at the time of PhD training. We test the effect of inbreeding on seven academic performance indicators for 473 scientists at Dutch universities during the period 1815–1943. We further investigate the main local research programs across disciplines and universities in The Netherlands using historical sources. Our analysis provides evidence that inbreeding generally enhances academic performance, but only in the early lifecycle stages of a new intellectual movement.