Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A senior researcher who provided weekly guidance to an early-career fellow on grant strategy and methodology, acknowledged in the fellow's narrative CV
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A one-off advice email is not mentorship in the contribution sense
Editorial commentary
Mentorship contribution is the career, intellectual, or methodological guidance a researcher provides to someone more junior, credited as a form of research-adjacent labour distinct from both formal supervision (which carries institutional evaluative authority) and co-authorship (which requires direct work on a specific output). It is increasingly captured in narrative CVs and Résumé-for-Researchers formats as a recognised research activity in its own right, reflecting a broader move — visible in initiatives like DORA — toward valuing contributions to the research ecosystem beyond publication output alone.
How it differs from related terms: Mentorship contribution is the activity of providing guidance; mentor and mentee are the roles of the two parties to that activity. It differs from lab leadership in scope — mentorship is guidance to an individual and can exist without any formal group-leadership role — and from sponsorship, which involves active advocacy rather than guidance.
Where mentorship materially shaped a specific published output, such as sustained guidance on a paper’s framing or methodology, a named, consented acknowledgement on that output is appropriate; the broader, ongoing mentoring relationship itself is more typically documented in the mentor’s and mentee’s own narrative CV records rather than credited paper-by-paper.
References
- Royal Society Résumé for Researchers (R4RI, 2020 v1, 2024 mandate)
- DORA Declaration (2012)
Also known as
Mentoring · Career mentorship
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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