A Study On The Impact Of College Teachers’ Mobility On Scientific Research Output

Faculty mobility in higher education is an important pathway to promote knowledge exchange,dissemination and innovation.At the same time,with the accelerating globalization and the implementation of China’s "double first-class"university construction program,university teachers as an important talent resource are competed for by universities,further promoting the acceleration of teacher mobility.However,the mobility of talents is two-sided:reasonable mobility can promote knowledge production and academic innovation,while disorderly mobility of talents can hinder knowledge output.In this context,it is a meaningful topic to focus on the impact of university faculty mobility on research output,providing new perspectives for the government to formulate talent policies,universities to rationally utilize and attract talents,and teachers to achieve individual development.In this study,we used biographical analysis,questionnaires and econometric analysis to collect information on teachers’ CVs and their journal publications before and after mobility through university portals and official databases,and used questionnaires to obtain subjective information from teachers to measure the impact of teachers’ mobility on the quantity and quality of research output.The study mainly includes the following aspects:firstly,the significance of the selected topic and the specific research method are clarified,while the domestic and international literature on university teachers’ mobility and research output is sorted out.Secondly,the concepts of research output,teacher mobility and teacher career development are defined in this paper,and the development process and related contents of push and pull theory and life course theory are elaborated to provide theoretical support for analyzing the impact of university teachers’ mobility on their research output in two stages of career development.Again,teacher mobility was characterized based on available data,and regression analysis was conducted based on Tobit model and negative binomial regression model to explore the impact of mobility on teachers’ research output at two stages of career development and its underlying mechanisms,respectively.Finally,the conclusions drawn in the previous paper are summarized,and on this basis,relevant suggestions for promoting rational and orderly teacher mobility and improving research output are proposed at the national,university and individual levels,respectively.The results of the study show that,first,at the regional level,teachers have different mobility characteristics in the two stages of career development.The mobility direction from initial to current positions gradually tends to be scattered and concentrated,with a higher preference for eastern regions such as North,Shanghai and Guangzhou.Meanwhile,at the institutional level,teachers in general colleges and universities gradually break away from the restrictions of institutional level and achieve upward mobility.Not only that,the study also found that working in a more demographically attractive area has a boosting effect on faculty research output.Second,under the given conditions,mobility does not always lead to an increase in research output.Mobility does not have a significant impact on the quantity of research output;it has a significant negative impact on the quality of research output,especially in Chinese.The academic resources acquired by faculty members in mobility do not show effects in the short term.Third,the effects of mobility can vary depending on the time point at which it occurs.In junior mobility,controlling for other factors,mobility has no significant effect on the quantity of teachers’ research output,while there is a significant negative effect on the quality of research output;in junior to current mobility,the movers show some advantages in the quantity of research output,but significantly lower in quality than teachers who did not experience mobility.The difference in the change in the number of research outputs between the two career development stages shows a cumulative effect from the initial to the current stage compared to the previous one.In addition,individual factors play an important role in mobility affecting research output.In general,job title was positively related to faculty academic level and research output,while age reflected a negative effect,while the difference in gender was significantly smaller in the group of faculty born in 1980 and later.However,in general,men were better at writing English papers,while women outperformed men in terms of the number of Chinese papers.Job satisfaction at the subjective level also has a mutually reinforcing effect with research output.The innovation of this paper is to integrate life course theory into the study of teacher mobility,and to visualize the changes in teachers’ research output after the transitional event of mobility from the perspective of two stages of teachers’ career development.It also enriches the research on inter-institutional mobility of teachers by focusing the study on inter-institutional mobility within the country.The weakness is that faculty work is multifaceted and measuring research output by papers alone is too one-sided and needs to be measured by incorporating more comprehensive indicators.