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Approximately One-Quarter of Top 2% Dermatology Scientists Show High Mentoring Potential: Development of a Vital Few Dashboard
ABSTRACT
Background:
Identifying senior scientists with strong mentoring potential may help trainees and early-career researchers select suitable mentors, observership hosts, and research environments. Conventional bibliometric rankings emphasize productivity and citation impact but provide limited information about authorship leadership, collaboration structure, and mentoring-compatible scholarly patterns. We developed a “Vital Few” dashboard to identify a smaller subset of highly ranked dermatology scientists with stronger mentoring-potential profiles.
Objective:
This study aimed to identify scientists with high mentoring potential among the Top 2% dermatology scientists and to develop a dashboard integrating real-time PubMed career-publication retrieval, mentoring-potential (MP) measures, and Rasch rating scale model (RSM) logits. We hypothesized that approximately one-quarter of qualified scientists would fall within the high-MP/high-RSM Vital Few quadrant.
Methods:
Ranked dermatology scientists were screened using predefined eligibility criteria based on career and recent publication counts, availability of usable full names for PubMed searches, and computable authorship-based indicators. Career publications were retrieved using real-time full-author-name PubMed queries. Mentoring-compatible metrics included the absolute advantage coefficient (AAC), structural-hole coefficient (SHC), corresponding-author/first-author leadership index (CLI), and middle-author rate (MAR). MP was expressed on a logit scale. The high-MP cutoff was 0.907 logits, corresponding approximately to AAC=0.712 and derived from Cohen’s medium effect-size benchmark transformed to log odds. The cohort mean RSM measure served as the second threshold for defining the Vital Few quadrant.
Results:
Of 1,220 ranked dermatology scientists screened, 721 (59.1%) qualified for analysis and 499 (40.9%) were excluded. Among qualified scientists, 166 (23.0%) were classified in the Vital Few quadrant; 181 (25.1%), 231 (32.0%), and 143 (19.8%) were classified in Q2, Q3, and Q4, respectively. MP showed a weak but statistically significant positive correlation with RSM (r=0.1853, P<.0001). The association between dichotomized MP and RSM groups was also significant (χ²=6.7783, P=.0092).
Conclusions:
Approximately one-quarter of qualified Top 2% dermatology scientists met the predefined Vital Few criteria of MP >0.907 logits and above-average RSM performance (>−4.303 logits). Integrating real-time PubMed career-publication retrieval with authorship, collaboration, MP, and Rasch-based measures provides an interpretable complement to conventional citation rankings for identifying potential mentors and observership hosts. External validation against documented mentorship activities and trainee outcomes remains necessary.
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Copyright
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