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What the record covers
Every doctoral supervision the record has read from a thesis: where it comes from, when it was written, and how many of its people can be followed into other records.
- doctoral supervisions
- 2,210,895of 6,793,944 at every level, advisor and student pairs named in thesis records
- sources
- 336university repositories and national lists of theses
- countries
- 48largest: United States, France, Spain
- busiest decade
- 2010s908,691 supervisions, 41.1% of all
- both people linked
- 4.0%87,940 supervisions whose two people are found in other records
every level
The record holds 6,004,169 theses at every level, naming 6,793,944 supervisions. 32.5% of those supervisions are doctoral. A thesis can name more than one supervisor, so a level can hold more supervisions than theses.
| level | theses | supervisions | share of supervisions | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| doctoratecounted below | 1,984,195 | 2,210,895 | 32.5% | |
| master's | 2,009,796 | 2,125,968 | 31.3% | |
| licentiate | 993 | 1,129 | <0.1% | |
| bachelor's | 971,607 | 1,433,334 | 21.1% | |
| level not stated | 1,037,578 | 1,017,943 | 15.0% | |
| other | 0 | 4,675 | 0.1% | |
people
6,672,116 people in the record, of whom 232,038 (3.5%) are linked to another register. The authors of the theses and the supervisors, examiners and committee members they name, at every level. An author whose thesis names no one else is not counted through it, and someone two sources name counts twice until a link ties their records together.
| ORCID iDa researcher's own id | 158,723 | |
|---|---|---|
| IdRefthe French university libraries' list of authors | 80,014 | |
| Wikidata itemthe open database behind Wikipedia | 51,411 | |
| GNDthe German National Library's list of people | 26,686 | |
| OpenAlex authorthe open index of research papers | 11,547 |
People linked by each kind of id. A person with ids of two kinds is in both rows.
papers and citations
The record knows 158,729 people, 2.4% of those in it, as an OpenAlex author or by an ORCID iD, the ids OpenAlex lists papers under.
A card reads a person's papers, coauthors and citations from OpenAlex as it opens. The record does not keep papers, so it does not count them or their citations. A person linked to Wikidata alone may show papers too, through Wikidata's link to OpenAlex, and is not counted here.
doctoral supervisions
From here the page counts doctoral supervisions alone: the line from advisor to student that a family of scholars is traced by.
linked to other records
A person is linked when a source gives them an id used beyond this record, such as an ORCID iD, or a checked match ties them to Wikidata or OpenAlex. A linked person can be followed from one source to another.
| both people linked | 87,940 | 4.0% |
|---|---|---|
| one of the two linked | 254,789 | 11.5% |
| neither linked | 1,868,166 | 84.5% |
Neither linked is where the record stops, not evidence that these people have no ids.
ids held, by kind
How many different ids of each kind the people in these supervisions hold.
| ORCID iDa researcher's own id | 118,244 | |
|---|---|---|
| IdRefthe French university libraries' list of authors | 79,789 | |
| Wikidata itemthe open database behind Wikipedia | 45,512 | |
| GNDthe German National Library's list of people | 21,559 | |
| OpenAlex authorthe open index of research papers | 10,237 |
A person with ids of two kinds is in both rows.
by decade
Supervisions by the decade the thesis was written. The gold in each bar is the part with both people linked: 7.0% in the 2020s, 0.4% before 2000.
- before 190046 supervisions0% both linked
- 1900s26 supervisions0% both linked
- 1910s513 supervisions0% both linked
- 1920s1,064 supervisions0.1% both linked
- 1930s1,438 supervisions0% both linked
- 1940s1,995 supervisions0% both linked
- 1950s4,669 supervisions<0.1% both linked
- 1960s15,527 supervisions0.1% both linked
- 1970s28,093 supervisions<0.1% both linked
- 1980s36,551 supervisions0.1% both linked
- 1990s105,134 supervisions0.6% both linked
- 2000s329,188 supervisions2.1% both linked
- 2010s908,691 supervisions2.9% both linked
- 2020s765,225 supervisions7.0% both linked
12,735 supervisions have no year, or one before 1800 or after the 2020s, and are in no decade. All are in the totals.
by country
Each country's supervisions and sources, the share with both people linked, and when its theses were written. A darker cell holds more supervisions; each step is ten times the one before.
- none recorded
- 1 to 99
- 100+
- 1,000+
- 10,000+
- 100,000+
| country | supervisions | sources | both linked | <19001900s1910s1920s1930s1940s1950s1960s1970s1980s1990s2000s2010s2020s | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| all supervisions | 2,210,895 | 336 | 4.0% | |||
| United States | 514,992 | 131 | <0.1% | |||
| France | 279,343 | 1 | 9.1% | |||
| Spain | 195,787 | 20 | 0.1% | |||
| Germany | 178,097 | 32 | 11.6% | |||
| Brazil | 161,936 | 17 | 2.1% | |||
| United Kingdom | 154,063 | 12 | 0% | |||
| Canada | 89,900 | 25 | <0.1% | |||
| Japan | 84,505 | 1 | 0% | |||
| Netherlands | 81,176 | 5 | 0.5% | |||
| Sweden | 76,445 | 2 | 27.1% | |||
| Portugal | 62,648 | 4 | 0.1% | |||
| Belgium | 53,691 | 4 | 25.4% | |||
| Switzerland | 50,906 | 1 | 0% | |||
| Mexico | 31,628 | 4 | <0.1% | |||
| Türkiye | 28,152 | 8 | <0.1% | |||
| Australia | 24,634 | 2 | 1.8% | |||
| Czechia | 17,212 | 4 | 0.1% | |||
| Serbia | 15,730 | 1 | 15.9% | |||
| Croatia | 13,010 | 1 | 3.2% | |||
| Finland | 11,002 | 3 | <0.1% | |||
| New Zealand | 10,043 | 3 | 0% | |||
| South Africa | 9,543 | 3 | 0% | |||
| Israel | 9,352 | 4 | 0% | |||
| Hong Kong SAR China | 7,575 | 2 | 0% | |||
| Colombia | 6,144 | 4 | 0% | |||
| Hungary | 5,681 | 3 | 0% | |||
| Poland | 5,657 | 5 | 0% | |||
| Argentina | 4,315 | 2 | 0% | |||
| Ireland | 4,107 | 3 | 0.2% | |||
| Italy | 3,671 | 2 | 0% | |||
| Thailand | 3,532 | 1 | 0% | |||
| Peru | 2,631 | 6 | 0% | |||
| Malaysia | 2,548 | 1 | 0% | |||
| Lithuania | 2,478 | 2 | 0.5% | |||
| Indonesia | 2,180 | 2 | 0% | |||
| Greece | 1,539 | 1 | 0% | |||
| Iceland | 1,317 | 2 | 0% | |||
| Réunion | 1,009 | 1 | 9.9% | |||
| Austria | 934 | 2 | 1.8% | |||
| United Arab Emirates | 439 | 1 | 0% | |||
| Saudi Arabia | 331 | 1 | 0% | |||
| Estonia | 287 | 1 | 0% | |||
| Qatar | 283 | 1 | 0% | |||
| Bangladesh | 164 | 1 | 0% | |||
| Kazakhstan | 133 | 1 | 0% | |||
| Costa Rica | 85 | 2 | 0% | |||
| Ukraine | 58 | 1 | 0% | |||
| Ecuador | 2 | 1 | 0% | |||
A blank cell is a decade with no supervision recorded for that country. That is where the record stops, not evidence that none were supervised there.
reading these numbers
- A supervision is a thesis record that names a doctoral student and the advisor who supervised them. Only supervisions a source states are counted.
- Nobody who asked not to be shown is counted.
- A person whose records give two different ids of one kind counts as not linked by that kind, as the record does not guess which is theirs.
- Wikidata's own 406,526 statements of who supervised whom are kept apart from these and never counted with them.
cited doctoral supervisions in 336 sources · counted 2026-10-20