ELSEVIER Research Policy 24 (1995) 137-150 research policy Scientists at major and minor universities: mobility along the prestige continuum 1 Koenraad Debackere ,,a, Michael A. Rappa b Universiteit Gent, De Vleriek School voor Management, Bellevue 6, B-9050 Gent, Belgium b Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Alfred P. Sloan School of Management, 50 Memorial Drive, E52-538, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA Final version received September 1993 Abstract This paper investigates the career progress of scientists at 'major and minor universities' once they have chosen to participate in the development of an emerging field, posing three fundamental questions: (1) are scientists who are involved in the early stages of a field's development and who persist more likely to graduate from more prestigious universities? (2) In an emerging field, do graduates from prestigious universities pursue career paths that differ from the ones pursued by their peers from less prestigious institutions? (3) Are graduates from prestigious universities who choose academic careers more likely to find employment at prestigious universities? Empirical evidence is provided on the career progress of 373 scientists working in the field of neural networks, graduating from US universities. The prestige of a scientist's graduate school is found to be a significant indicator of the prestige of his or her academic appointment in the initial five years after graduation. Beyond five years, the effect of graduate school prestige becomes non-significant. Whether one entered the field before or after it gained widespread legitimacy in the scientific community apparently does not affect subsequent career progress in terms of institutional prestige. I. Introduction * Corresponding author. 1 The authors greatly appreciate the advice and support of Thomas Allen, Edward Roberts, Roland Van Dierdonck and three anonymous referees. We also acknowledge the generous assistance of Henry Small and the Institute for Scientific Information. Koenraad Debackere was supported with grants from ICM (Brussels, Belgium), the Belgian National Founda- tion for Scientific Research, and the Fulbright Scholar Pro- gram. Part of the research was sponsored by grants from the MIT International Center for Research on the Management of Technology. Given sociologists' interest in occupational and career patterns [15,25,45], it is not surprising that the scientific profession has received close scruti- ny [2,14,17,26]. Indeed, numerous aspects of the sociological dynamics of a scientist's career have been examined, but perhaps none more closely than the determinants of career advancement along the prestige continuum of research institu- tions, the so-called major and minor universities 0048-7333/95/$09.50 © 1995 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 0048-7333(93)0755-I