Abstract
The mobility of scientists between different universities and countries is important to foster knowledge exchange. At the same time, the potential mobility is restricted by geographic and institutional constraints, which leads to temporal correlations in the career trajectories of scientists. To quantify this effect, we extract 3.5 million career trajectories of scientists from two large scale bibliographic data sets and analyze them applying a novel method of higher-order networks. We study the effect of temporal correlations at three different levels of aggregation, universities, cities and countries. We find strong evidence for such correlations for the top 100 universities, i.e. scientists move likely between specific institutions. These correlations also exist at the level of countries, but cannot be found for cities. Our results allow to draw conclusions about the institutional path dependence of scientific careers and the efficiency of mobility programs.
Highlights
Mobility of high-skill labour is a hot topic in economics, politics and research policy
To better understand the source of the identified temporal correlation, we study the temporal motifs of length two
If we find that the P(emp) of both motif types are similar to P(2), but not P(1), we can conclude that the temporal correlations stem from both motif types
Summary
Mobility of high-skill labour is a hot topic in economics, politics and research policy. We test if scientific careers are global and free, resulting in a worldwide scientist mobility network with high levels of exchange and mixing. To empirically address the importance of academic mobility and consequences for knowledge exchange, we reconstruct the career trajectories of scientists through bibliographic data.
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