  Changing institutions is an integral part of an academic life. Yet little is
known about the mobility patterns of scientists at an institutional level and
how these career choices affect scientific outcomes. Here, we examine over
420,000 papers, to track the affiliation information of individual scientists,
allowing us to reconstruct their career trajectories over decades. We find that
career movements are not only temporally and spatially localized, but also
characterized by a high degree of stratification in institutional ranking. When
cross-group movement occurs, we find that while going from elite to lower-rank
institutions on average associates with modest decrease in scientific
performance, transitioning into elite institutions does not result in
subsequent performance gain. These results offer empirical evidence on
institutional level career choices and movements and have potential
implications for science policy.
