Academic friendship as a form of mentorship in education and science

the change of generations and the arrival of employees from other fields to universities makes universities more actively follow new trends, such as a human-centered turn in attitudes towards employees, horizontal communications, academic honesty, cooperation, trust, and openness. Academic friendship as a system of informal support relationships between students, teachers, and researchers at the university is one of the available means of satisfying the needs of young and entry-level employees to enjoy their work, development and growth. Based on the study of foreign sources, the authors problematize the issue of studying friendship as a type of interpersonal relations in higher education, which have business significance due to mentoring potential. They build a map of 289 keywords on the topic of «Friendship as Mentoring» based on publications in the OpenAlex bibliometric database using the VOSviewer program. The essence of academic friendship is revealed by 9 clusters of concepts formed around the words higher education, perception, feeling, professional development, description, teacher development, graduate students, career development, interpersonal relations. Some of the oldest concepts on the map are the words protégé, professional education, career counseling. New words include healthy environment, selfefficacy, transformative learning. The authors specified the problem field, established and described the place and significance of friendship in the structure of business relations in a scientific and educational organization. They build a diagram of the structure of business relations in a scientific and educational organization and determine the place of academic friendship in it, based on the description of A. I. Prigogine. The interest of employees not only in the business, but also in each other determines academic friendship as part of informal and socio-psychological communication structures. Further research can be devoted to the development of a model of academic friendship, the study of interpersonal communications in graduate and doctoral studies as institutions of personalized mentoring in the academic environment, the analysis of the behavior of students and teachers as actors of mentoring practices and participants in mentoring pairs.