Title
Career On The Move: Geography, Stratification, And Scientific Impact
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1038/srep04770
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Keywords
Field
DocType
biomedical research,text mining,bioinformatics
Data science,Science policy,Ranking,Empirical evidence,Elite,Computer science,Regional science,Geography
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
4
2045-2322
25
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.97
12
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Deville Pierre1844.10
Dashun Wang262727.09
Sinatra Roberta31128.65
Chaoming Song458023.58
Vincent D. Blondel51880184.86
Albert-lászló Barabási646491107.35