Most view academic inbreeding as detrimental to academic careers. Koen Frenken & Giovanna Capponi propose a new ‘genealogical’ view whereby scientists are considered ‘inbred’ if they obtained their PhD from the same institution as their supervisor.

They argue that the effects of inbreeding on individual careers depend on the stage of the lifecycle of local research programs at universities. They reconstruct the number of generations of inbreds preceding an individual scholar during PhD training. We then test the effect of inbreeding on six academic performance measures for 473 scientists at Dutch universities during the period 1815-1943.

Using historical sources, they further investigate the main local research programs across disciplines and universities in The Netherlands. Our analysis provides evidence that inbreeding generally enhances academic performance in the early lifecycle stages of a new intellectual movement, while it can become detrimental after a movement’s intellectual peak.

AUTHORS
Giovanna Capponi (Utrecht University) & Koen Frenken (Utrecht University)

KEYWORDS
Inbreeding, genealogy, prizes, academic society, lifecycle, Dutch science