The influence of mentorship on medical postgraduates’ academic impact: evidence from China

Academic impact is highly valuable for the development of research competence among medical postgraduates, but empirical evidence regarding how to improve postgraduate students’ academic impact through mentoring can be improved. This study aims to explore the influence of mentorship on medical postgraduates’ academic impact from a social exchange perspective. A dataset is constructed by retrieving 24,590 scientific papers from 450 postgraduate student–mentor pairs at Chinese universities. Descriptive analyses, Spearman’s correlation analysis, regression analysis and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis are used to test the hypothesized relationships among the variables. Chinese medical postgraduate students present a higher h-index when they (a) conduct research on the basis of previous research by their mentors, (b) are supervised by mentors with higher-level fecundity, (c) develop close relationships with mentors, and (d) receive resources through international cooperation and basic clinical interdisciplinary cooperation. However, these effects are not completely consistent across doctoral and master’s degree students. The results reveal that intellectual similarity, mentors’ fecundity level and degrees of relationship closeness, international cooperation and interdisciplinary cooperation contribute positively to medical postgraduate training. Intervention programs with differentiated strategies for the development of doctoral and master’s degree students and aimed at improving intellectual similarity, relationship closeness and interdisciplinary cooperation are recommended to increase the potential of postgraduate students to attain high-level academic impacts.