Assessing the relation between academic talent mobility and academic output

There is a great controversy between academic talent mobility and academic output. This paper obtains the list of mobile academic talents (experimental group) from NSF. It matches them into the control group list according to the indicators of an academic institution, department, research direction, entry time, age, and NSF fund obtained in the near year. It carries out a seven-year follow-up survey on the quantity and quality of papers published by the experimental and control groups, using the “quasi-experimental research” method for the first time. The results show that, on the one hand, the academic output of Chinese academic talents is highly stable. Mobility is not the critical variable affecting academic output, indicating that academic output is more related to talents' research habits and research ability, which shows the highly stable academic quality of scholars; on the other hand, the study finds that scholars returning from overseas manifest the stability of academic output whose number and quality of academic papers remain highly stable even if the mobility happens again. This study reveals the objective relationship between academic talent mobility and academic output. It has significant reference value for China in the next stage of attracting talent from the international academic labor market.