Scientific mobility, prestige and topic alignment in research institutions

Abstract Research institutions are crucial in driving intellectual, social, and technological progress. Their ability to innovate depends mainly on their ability to attract, retain, and nurture scientific talent, ultimately making it available to other organizations, industries, or the economy. As researchers change institutions during their careers, their research topics also shift. The extent and mechanisms by which research institutions manage their internal portfolio of scientific topics through the attraction and deployment of researchers are far from well understood. We examine 25 million publication histories of 9.2 million scientists extracted from a large-scale bibliographic database covering thousands of research institutions worldwide to understand how the topics of mobile scientists align with those present in-house. We find a correlation between top-ranked institutions and greater topic alignment, i.e., the degree to which topics of incoming academics match those of their colleagues at the institution. We uncover a similarly high level of alignment among scientists leaving top-ranked institutions. The alignment of research topics in research institutions is more pronounced in engineering, life, health, earth, and physical sciences than in mathematics, computer science, social sciences, and the humanities. We show that institutions have generally become more closely aligned in their overall topic profile over the past two decades. We interpret these results in terms of the levels of proactive management of the composition of the scientific workforce and internal collaboration strategies at the institutional level.