Scholar's Career Switch from Academia to Industry: Mining and Analysis from AMiner

Abstract

The phenomenon of scholars switching their careers from academia to industry has become more prevalent nowadays. This paper proposes a combination approach of bibliometrics analysis and data mining to study the phenomenon from the perspective of Science of Science (SciSci). Based on the proposed methods, this paper first provides an overview of frequent companies and frequent universities as well as the exponentially increasing number of scholars under the scenario. And then, this study uncovers the excessively single patterns in South Korean scholars switches using frequent pattern mining from their papers. This paper studies the knowledge and technology transfer (KTT) and the research change of scholars by using the language model, the result of which illustrates that the research difference between industry and academia gradually decreases and reaches a steady state in recent years. In exploring the driving factors of the phenomenon, deep preliminary cooperation may be an essential reason, and the career switches will not promote the published amounts of papers but may benefit its academic influence. This study should, therefore, be of value to researchers wishing to study the academia-industry career switches more intensely.