Career on the Move: Geography, Stratification, and Scientific Impact

TL;DR

This study analyzes over 420,000 scientific papers to understand how scientists' institutional mobility patterns influence their research impact, revealing stratification and limited performance gains from moving into elite institutions.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of scientists' career mobility, highlighting stratification and its effects on scientific performance.

Findings

Career movements are localized in time and space.

High stratification exists in institutional rankings.

Moving from elite to lower-ranked institutions slightly reduces performance.

Abstract

Changing institutions is an integral part of an academic life. Yet little is known about the mobility patterns of scientists at an institutional level and how these career choices affect scientific outcomes. Here, we examine over 420,000 papers, to track the affiliation information of individual scientists, allowing us to reconstruct their career trajectories over decades. We find that career movements are not only temporally and spatially localized, but also characterized by a high degree of stratification in institutional ranking. When cross-group movement occurs, we find that while going from elite to lower-rank institutions on average associates with modest decrease in scientific performance, transitioning into elite institutions does not result in subsequent performance gain. These results offer empirical evidence on institutional level career choices and movements and have potential implications for science policy.