What a Faculty Departure Costs

Universities price appointments with care: the offer, the start-up package, the laboratory. Departures are seldom priced at all. A resignation is recorded as a vacancy, and the search to fill it begins. What the departure does to the institution's research record is rarely estimated.

It should be, because a small number of researchers carry most of that record.

A fifth of researchers, four fifths of the record

ATLAS models 29 Gulf universities paper by paper. In each, it counts the researchers with at least three papers in the current ranking window and ranks them by their papers in the world's top 10%. The top fifth of those researchers appear on a median 81% of their institution's top-10% papers, between 69 and 88% across the 29. They appear on 60% of all its papers.¹

Arrivals show the same pattern. Our brief What an Appointment Adds found that the strongest fifth of arrivals at Gulf universities wrote 62% of the top-10% papers that arrivals published.

Field by field

The concentration is sharper inside a field. Across 442 pairings of an institution and a field with at least 20 top-10% papers, three researchers appear on a median 29% of the field's top-10% papers, and one researcher on 13%.²

Exhibit 1

Share of a field's top-10% papers on which its three leading researchers appear, Gulf universities, papers 2021 to 2025

Field	Median share	Institutions where three researchers appear on half or more
Economics, econometrics and finance	55%	72%
Physics and astronomy	47%	43%
Energy	35%	15%
Mathematics	33%	20%
Engineering	24%	0%
Medicine	17%	4%

These are measures of exposure, not of loss. Papers already published keep their affiliation, and co-authors who stay carry part of the work forward. What a departure removes is the future output the researcher would have signed.

Frequency against weight

Two risks sit side by side: how often a field loses researchers, and how much each departure carries. In medicine and engineering, Gulf institutions gained 2.0 and 2.5 researchers for every one they lost between 2021 and 2024, against 2.6 across all fields. Departures there are relatively frequent, but each carries a small share of the record.³

Physics and astronomy combines both risks. It had the fewest arrivals for every departure of any field in the exhibit, 1.8, on small numbers, and three researchers appear on 47% of its top-10% papers. A single departure there puts a median of about a third of the field's most cited work at risk.

A retention review reads both. For each field, it shows who carries the record, what each researcher contributes to the institution's average, and the observable career facts that bear on a move. Each departure is priced before an offer from elsewhere arrives.

Footnotes

1. ATLAS institution records, 29 Gulf universities modelled paper by paper (24 in Saudi Arabia), papers 2021 to 2025, read 19 October 2026. "Appear on": the researcher is an author of the paper at the institution. A paper is in the top 10% when its citations exceed the 90th percentile of its field and year, on the ATLAS scale. ↩

2. Institution-field pairs with at least 20 top-10% papers; researchers ranked by top-10% papers within the field. ↩

3. ATLAS movement registry, complete moves 2021 to 2024, read 18 October 2026; counts are a floor. Medicine and engineering ratios as published in Gulf Faculty Movement, 2026. Physics and astronomy: 35 arrivals and 19 departures, from the same registry; its ratio is the lowest of the fields shown on all three evidence cuts. ↩