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Re:Ask HN: two developers with no marketing skills built an ... by ig1 on Tuesday May 14, 2013 @01:17PM (#5706366)
It seems like your approach would suffer a lot of selection bias and would need to collect a lot of data before it would be useful, hence it'll be hard to bootstrap contributors.

I'm not an academic, but wouldn't a better strategy be to do co-authorship analysis on papers to generate similar information. That is you could say researchers who co-wrote their initial papers with more senior researcher X (normally indicating a supervisor or mentor relationship) at lab Y tend to end up at Z and have an average research impact score of R.

That way you could get all the data from analyzing public citation databases and avoid the chicken-and-egg problem with trying to crowdsource the data, and go directly to solving the main problem of comparing potential PhD supervisors based on their trackrecord.

Re:Ask HN: two developers with no marketing skills built an ... by stfu on Wednesday May 15, 2013 @09:54PM (#5716425)
Love that idea. That could also lead to an interesting analysis which institution the co-authors give as their home institution. Might be even demonstrate causality, e.g. researcher X from institution X works with researcher Y from institution Y and later researcher X joins institution Y as well. I'm suspecting there are some academic tribes out there.
Re:Ask HN: two developers with no marketing skills built an ... by phdtree on Tuesday May 14, 2013 @01:23PM (#5706406)
Yes, that's definitely one interesting direction we should go pursue. Thanks a lot!