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.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 4770 |
| Journal | Scientific reports |
| Volume | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 24 2014 |
Funding
We thank Nicolas Boumal and colleagues from the Center for Complex Network Research (CCNR) for the valuable discussions and comments. D.W., C.S., and A.L.B. are supported by Lockheed Martin Corporation (SRA 11.18.11), the Network Science Collaborative Technology Alliance is sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory under agreement W911NF-09-2-0053, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under agreement 11645021, and the Future and Emerging Technologies Project 317 532 \u2018\u2018Multiplex\u2019\u2019 financed by the European Commission. P.D. is supported by the National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS) and by the Research Department of the Communaut\u00E9 fran\u00E7aise de Belgique (Large Graph Concerted Research Action). R.S. acknowledges support from the James S. McDonnell Foundation.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General