Departmental Effects on Scientific Productivity

Productive scientists tend to hold jobs at prestigious university departments, but it is unclear whether this is because good departments hire the best scientists or because good departments encourage and facilitate research productivity. To resolve this issue, we studied the antecedents and consequences of 179 job changes by chemists, biologists, physicists, and mathematicians. Those who were upwardly mobile showed substantial increases in their rate of publication and in the rate of citation to those publications, while those who were downwardly mobile showed substantial decreases in productivity. Earlier analyses of these job changes found only a small effect of prior productivity on destination prestige. These results suggest that the effect of department affiliation on productivity is more important than the effect of productivity on departmental affiliation.