PhD Tree: The website that lets you see how incestuous research science is

Last week I received an unusual piece of spam in my email inbox. It was from a website called PhDtree.org . Evidently someone thought that it would be an awesome idea to spam email addresses acquired from PubMed in order to publicize the site.

The concept behind the website is an interesting one. The idea is to follow the academia genealogy of scientists through their research careers. It’s an idea that I’ve joked about with colleagues at conferences and it’s therefore interesting to see someone attempting to make it a reality. It’s somehow been auto-populated as I haven’t added anything to the site, but two entries from my M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees are present. Sort of a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon for researchers. It would be interesting to identify people who are hubs in the network. Someone has even decided that it’s worth doing an Academic Genealogy of Nobel Prize Winners .

At the moment the tree and most of the entries are very heavily skewed towards one sex. It would be interesting to see if an analysis of the data could highlight leak points in the leaky pipeline or identify particular PIs that exhibit biases in the trainees that they take on.

Not sure if it will take off or not, but it’s an interesting idea.

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