To move or to be promoted: Examining the effect of promotions and academic mobility on professors' productivity and impact

Promotions and academic mobility are trajectory‐altering events in a researcher's career. This paper compiles a unique large data set and investigates publication and citation differences between two groups of researchers: the ones who are mobile and their counterparts who stay at a university with a promotion. This paper finds that mobile researchers often have a lesser productivity increase than their post‐promotion counterparts. The difference is largely driven by male professors in physical science and clinical health fields moving from more research‐intensive to less research‐intensive institutions. In contrast, the citational impact differences between the two groups are largely minimal.