Want to Trace Your Academic Roots? The SIOP Family Tree Is Now Live

Submitted by Yihao Liu, Chair of the SIOP History Committee

Are you curious if you are related to the “founding fathers” of psychology such as Wilhelm Wundt, William James, and Edward Thorndike? Do you want to trace your academic roots among generations of I-O researchers?

The SIOP History Committee is excited to announce that the Academic Family Tree for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, a free, volunteer-run website designed to help you track your academic genealogy, is now live. We would like to sincerely thank Cornelius König and Wendy Bedwell for the tremendous amount of time and effort they put into this project in the past year to make this happen.

We invite all SIOP members to join the tree and explore your academic connections, including your academic parents and grandparents, siblings, cousins, children, and many more. Our goal is to collect information about the mentoring relationships between I-O researchers and practitioners in the field. This tree exists as a part of the larger Academic Family Tree, which seeks to build a genealogy across multiple academic fields.

A quick peek at the family tree for the current SIOP President Mo Wang:

How do I sign up and add new information?
Sign up for an account by clicking “Sign In/Register” in the upper right corner of the page. Once registered, you will be able to add and edit information to the site. To add a new person, click “New Person” on the top navigation bar. To add a new connection to an existing person, navigate to their info page and click “New Child” or “New Parent.” First and last name are required for new people, and connections between two people require specifying the type of relationship (graduate student, postdoc, etc.). Any other details that can be provided are much appreciated, such as institutional affiliations and research area keywords.

I have not signed up; why is my name already on the tree?
This is likely because the ProQuest dissertation database has documented the advisor associated with each doctoral dissertation in their system. We used this data to populate some nodes in the system. We tried to be conservative and make only high confidence matches to existing data, but there are likely to be some errors. If you do notice an error, you can either correct it by updating information from your account or file an error report if the error persists. For example, you may notice a note “Neurotree” next to your name on the tree if you are one of such matches. To get your account transferred to the I-O tree, please file an error report so we can manually update your information.

How do I edit my information?
After you sign in, you will be able to link your account to your own node, even if it was already entered by another user. If you skipped the account linking step during the initial sign-up, you can take care of it by clicking on “My node” at the bottom of the page after logging in.

What affiliation(s) should I include in my account?
Only your most current affiliation will be displayed on the tree. However, we encourage you to include all your previous and current affiliations, and specify the starting and ending years of each affiliation, regardless the affiliation being the school of your previous graduate program, the school in which you currently work/study, or the company in which you currently work.

For more information on how to sign up, add new information, and edit existing information, please refer to this FAQ page.

If you have any questions and concerns, please feel free to reach out to Yihao Liu, Chair of the SIOP history committee, at yihaoliu@illinois.edu. Have fun exploring the tree and making SIOP connections!