Researcher mobility, co-authorship and individual research agendas

This study investigates whether researchers whose published research record is more thematically broad —covering more, and more semantically distant, topics— are also characterized by specific patterns in their mobility between research organizations and countries and their co-authorship patterns. We study a large sample of productive authors in STEM fields who have been active in Germany. Our results show that specific types of international mobility go together with slightly elevated epistemic breadth. But scientists with larger co-author networks have relatively greater epistemic breadth. Finally, some disciplines, such as geosciences and astronomy, are comprised of researchers with low average epistemic breadth, while others, primarily computer science subfields, have many high-epistemic breadth researchers.