Interuniversity Mobility of Academic Scientists

Previous longitudinal studies of scientists' movements in academic jobs found no evidence that research productivity affects prestige attainments. In this paper, however, we find a weak, but significant effect of productivity on the destination prestige of 274 job changes by academic physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and biologists. Major determinants of the prestige of the destination department are prestige of the prior job, prestige of the doctoral department, and the number of articles published in the six years prior to the move. Measures of citation frequency have no detectable effect, however. For promotion in rank at the occurrence of a job change, the major determinants are origin rank, professional age, and citation frequency.