Mapping Nobel Laureates’ Education and Careers, 1901–2024: Country- and City-scale Trajectories

The geographical configuration of science is profoundly shaped by the mobility of people. Nobel Laureates offer a lens to examine how education-to-career pathways reconfigure global knowledge spaces. We compile a geo-referenced dataset of 745 laureates (1901–2024 for Chemistry, Physics, Medicine; 1969–2024 for Economic sciences). Mobility is classified into educational, transitional, and professional stages; trajectories are traced at country and city scales to analyze temporal trends, flows, and hub evolution. Findings reveal marked spatiotemporal heterogeneity: educational migration rises long-term while professional mobility declines, contradicting assumptions of ever-increasing research mobility. North America and Europe dominate; top host countries are the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany, while enduring city hubs include Berkeley, Cambridge (US/UK), London, and Berlin. US internal mobility declines gradually, whereas intra-European exchanges, especially involving France and Switzerland, strengthen. A pre-World War II mobility peak is followed by postwar stabilization. Three main insights emerge: 1) mobility patterns are scale-dependent and stage-differentiated; 2) dominant corridors persist but internal configurations diversify, with hubs consolidating and networks rewiring; 3) city-level nodes reveal finer-grained advantages, as some European cities gain exchange functions while US core cities lose inward mobility. Integrating migration geography with multi-scalar network thinking, we advance understanding of how geopolitical shifts and place-based research capacities shape global knowledge production. City-level granularity is essential for identifying training, placement, and circulation corridors that national summaries obscure.