Academic Genealogy Shapes Writing Style, Study Finds

A new study from arXiv (2608.14843) reveals that academic advisors' writing styles significantly influence their students, a factor that could undermine authorship attribution systems. The research, which analyzed 5,803 authors with at least two solo papers from the Mathematics Genealogy Project, found that advisors are 39.9% closer in cosine distance to their students than random same-field authors, using embeddings from a fine-tuned model. Two open encoders reproduced the effect at 12.6% and 14.5%. The study also found that 'academic siblings'—students of the same advisor who may never have met—sit 30.4% closer across 8,360 pairs, even when they studied at different institutions. Pairs sharing only an institution and a field showed negligible similarity. The findings suggest that authorship attribution systems, which assume each author's style is unique, may falsely accuse legitimate authors who have inherited stylistic quirks from their mentors. The research highlights the need for attribution systems to account for academic genealogy to avoid errors in detecting ghostwritten and AI-generated papers.