The Rise of Academic Nomadism: How Multiple Affiliations are Reshaping Higher Education
"Explore the increasing trend of researchers holding positions at multiple institutions and its implications for the future of science and academia."
Universities and research institutions play a vital role in shaping scientific advancements. These institutions control access to critical resources, networks, and infrastructure. This not only impacts the work of researchers, but also significantly influences the value society places on their contributions. Academic success and career progression are heavily influenced by the prestige associated with the institutions a researcher is affiliated with. Science policy, through international rankings and performance-based funding, further intensifies this emphasis on institutional affiliation.
The heightened importance of institutional affiliations is leading to a notable trend: academics are increasingly associating with multiple institutions, reporting these affiliations in their published work. While the concept of multiple affiliations, or co-affiliations, has existed for some time, where researchers are formally connected to more than one institution simultaneously, the phenomenon is largely understudied. This trend raises questions about the changing dynamics within academia, the motivations behind researchers seeking multiple affiliations, and the potential consequences for science and higher education.
This article delves into the growing trend of multiple institutional affiliations in academia, drawing on a comprehensive analysis of research publications from 40 countries over a 24-year period. It explores the extent of this phenomenon, the reasons driving its growth, and its implications for research, science policy, and the structure of academic institutions. The analysis considers international differences, particularly in how multiple affiliations are influenced by competitive funding structures and excellence initiatives.
A Growing but Hard-to-Measure Trend
Academic nomadism—researchers and faculty holding ties with more than one university—appears to be growing, though reliable figures are difficult to establish. Because institutions report affiliations in inconsistent ways, headlines about the phenomenon often rest on anecdote or a few well-publicized cases rather than comprehensive data. The most defensible statement is that multiple affiliations are becoming a recognized feature of research careers, especially for scholars whose work spans international networks. Precise counts remain a matter of ongoing reporting and measurement rather than settled consensus.
Defining the Academic in a Single-Institution Frame
The term "academic" is conventionally defined by its relationship to an academy or school, especially of higher learning, and to studying, thinking, and scholarly work (see Merriam-Webster's and Cambridge Dictionary's definitions). Common synonyms such as scholarly, scholastic, and collegiate reinforce the assumption that academic life is anchored to one institution (Merriam-Webster Thesaurus). This traditional framing treats the university, rather than the individual, as the natural unit of affiliation, which is precisely the assumption multiple appointments complicate. The limitation of this vocabulary is that it has little room for the scholar whose identity is split across several universities—none of which fully claims them. Definitions built around a single academy therefore describe the conventional career rather than the distributed one.
The Oxford University Press Model of Scholarly Continuity
Long before distributed affiliations became common, academic reputation was built through association with enduring publishing institutions, as exemplified by Oxford University Press and its academic journals, books, and collections. The Oxford Academic platform frames itself as a resource for every step of the research journey, underscoring how peer-reviewed publication—rather than institutional appointment alone—has historically anchored scholarly identity. This tradition of systematized, platform-based knowledge dissemination provided the scaffolding on which modern research careers were built. It also hints at why academic nomadism matters: when affiliation loosens, durable publication records and publishing platforms become the more stable markers of scholarly standing.
The Data: Unveiling the Scale of Multiple Affiliations
To understand the prevalence and nature of multiple affiliations, a large-scale bibliometric analysis was conducted, utilizing affiliation data from over 15 million authors across 40 countries. The study examined over 22 million research articles published between 1996 and 2019, covering 26 distinct scientific fields. This extensive dataset provides a detailed view of how multiple affiliations have evolved over time and across different regions and disciplines.
- Increasing Prevalence: In 2019, almost one in three articles were co-authored by individuals with multiple affiliations.
- Growth Over Time: The proportion of authors with multiple affiliations has risen from approximately 10% in 1996 to 16% in 2019.
- Consistent Across Fields: This growth is observed across all scientific fields.
- Stronger in High-Impact Journals: The trend is particularly pronounced in high-impact journals, indicating a strategic emphasis on affiliations for visibility and prestige.
- Academic Focus: Roughly 60% of multiple affiliations are within the academic sector.
- International Collaboration: International co-affiliations account for about a quarter of all multiple affiliations.
Research Platforms as the New Home of Scholarship
The most visible recent development in the discovery of scholarly work is the rise of open repositories rather than institutional listings, and Academia.edu reports making roughly 65 million research papers findable to researchers worldwide. This scale suggests that the practical architecture of research—sharing, finding, and reviewing papers—has moved well beyond any single university's walls. For nomadic scholars, such platforms effectively serve as a portable affiliation, decoupling a researcher's visibility from their current paycheck. Reviews and search on these services increasingly track scholars directly, offering a picture of expertise that institutional directories often fail to capture.
Skepticism About the Nomadic Model
Not everyone is convinced that multiple affiliations strengthen scholarship, and critics raise concerns that are hard to dismiss. One worry is that nominal appointments can outstrip the actual time a scholar spends at any single institution, leaving students and colleagues without dependable access. Another is that the practice may reinforce existing inequalities, since the scholars best placed to hold multiple positions are usually those already well-established. Since detailed studies are limited, however, claims about both the benefits and the failures of academic nomadism should be read as informed debate rather than settled outcome.
Single-Affiliation Versus Multi-Affiliation Careers
When comparing the traditional single-affiliation career with a nomadic one, the trade-offs are plausibly significant even if not yet systematically measured. The single-institution path generally offers continuity of resources, community, and institutional support, while the multi-affiliation path may offer broader access, greater flexibility, and wider visibility. These comparisons would ideally weigh outcomes like productivity, research quality, and career longevity, but such analyses remain scarce. For now, most assessments are more reasoned extrapolation than empirically verified conclusion.
The Bigger Picture: Reassessing Success in Academia
The trend towards multiple academic affiliations calls for a re-evaluation of how we measure institutional success and individual achievement in science. Policymakers and academic leaders must acknowledge the complex realities of modern research, where collaborations and distributed expertise are increasingly common. Rather than simply counting affiliations, evaluations should consider the quality of contributions and the impact of research, regardless of where it originates. This shift can foster a more equitable and accurate assessment of scientific progress, encouraging collaboration while recognizing the diverse ways researchers contribute to the advancement of knowledge.
Where the Evidence Converges
Looking across the available material, a cautious synthesis is that academic identity has always been built on durable anchors—institutions on the one hand, publishing and scholarship on the other—and that multiple affiliations shift weight from the former to the latter. Experts would likely agree that the phenomenon reflects broader changes in funding, mobility, and networked collaboration, even while figures describing its scale remain uncertain. What emerges is not a settled verdict but a working consensus: affiliation is becoming more elastic, and research outputs are becoming the truer measure of a scholarly career. Any stronger claims would outrun the evidence currently in hand.
Toward Portable and Credentialed Careers
Looking ahead, the trajectory of academic nomadism will probably depend on how institutions adjust hiring, tenure, and credit-sharing rules to a more mobile workforce, though these changes are not guaranteed. Emerging trends such as digital scholarly platforms and accessible repositories could further reduce the importance of a physical home campus, giving researchers more reason to hold multiple ties. The frontier is likely to be about formalizing the informal—turning opportunistic multiple appointments into governed, transparent arrangements. Which of these possibilities materialize will depend on institutional choices and funding realities that are difficult to predict.
Nomadism Within a Strained Academic System
Multiple affiliations highlight, rather than cause, deeper stresses in higher education, such as funding pressure, precarity, and the concentration of prestige among a small number of institutions. When a scholar is listed at several universities, the arrangement can obscure just where teaching, mentoring, and administrative obligations actually fall. The systemic challenge is accountability: affiliation without clearly defined duties risks diluting everyone's responsibility. Addressing this fairly will require institutions to think about how distributed careers fit within existing governance and workload systems, a problem that remains largely unresolved.
Careers, Communities, and Competing Demands
Behind the statistics and policy questions sit individual scholars whose lives are stretched across time zones, campuses, and communities. A nomadic career can offer intellectual variety and opportunity, but it can also mean fragmented mentoring, weaker local ties, and heavier travel and coordination burdens. For students and junior colleagues at each affiliated institution, the impact can be a supervisor who is technically present but frequently elsewhere. The human cost and benefit of this arrangement is felt unevenly, and is the dimension most likely to shape how the model is ultimately judged.