Academic Family Tree, which began as Neurotree, is an online database for academic genealogy, containing numerous "family trees" of academic disciplines. Neurotree was established in 2005 as a family tree of neuroscientists. Later that year Academic Family Tree incorporated Neurotree and family trees of other scholarly disciplines.
Unlike a conventional genealogy or family tree, in which connections among individuals are from kinship (e.g., parents to children), connections in Academic Family Tree are from mentoring relationships, usually among people working in academic settings (e.g., doctoral supervisors to students).
Academic Family Tree has been used as sources of information for the history and prospects of academic fields such as psychology,[1] meteorology,[2] organizational communication,[3] and neuroscience.[4][5][6][7] It has been used to address infometrics,[1][4] to research issues of scientific methodology,[8] and to examine mentor characteristics that predict mentee academic success.[9]