Academics' mobility revisited: validating dimensions and unpacking inequalities

The mobility of academics plays a central role in global knowledge circulation, yet existing classifications often lack theoretical grounding and empirical validation. To address this gap, this study proposes and validates a multidimensional framework that categorizes mobility across three dimensions: geographic scope (immigration, visiting, joint appointment), institutional prestige (upward vs. downward), and career stage (early vs. late). Grounded in social capital theory, the framework conceptualizes academic mobility as a resource shaped by individual factors, thereby highlighting inherent inequalities in access and outcomes. Using data from Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) and SciSciNet (1800–2020), we established a dataset comprising 793,158 scholars and 2,938,227 mobility events. We validated our classification with manually annotated data and examined how individual characteristics influence mobility patterns. Results reveal substantial variation across mobility types: geographic and career-stage mobility exhibit distinct distributional patterns, whereas prestige-based mobility shows no significant differentiation. These findings highlight the need to treat mobility dimensions separately. Importantly, inequalities manifest differently across mobility dimensions, where discipline and country of origin strongly influence geographic mobility, while gender significantly shapes mobility across career stages. © The Author(s) 2026.