  The mobility of scientists between different universities and countries is
important to foster knowledge exchange. At the same time, the potential
mobility is restricted by geographic and institutional constraints, which leads
to temporal correlations in the career trajectories of scientists. To quantify
this effect, we extract 3.5 million career trajectories of scientists from two
large scale bibliographic data sets and analyze them applying a novel method of
higher-order networks. We study the effect of temporal correlations at three
different levels of aggregation, universities, cities and countries. We find
strong evidence for such correlations for the top 100 universities, i.e.
scientists move likely between specific institutions. These correlations also
exist at the level of countries, but cannot be found for cities. Our results
allow to draw conclusions about the institutional path dependence of scientific
careers and the efficiency of mobility programs.

Social and Information Networks;Physics and Society