AbstractThis study addresses stratification in the global higher education research community and the changing geography of country affiliations in six elite journals. The distribution of country affiliations is analyzed from a longitudinal perspective (1996–2018), and full-time and part-time authors in the field are contrasted. The prestige maximization model and principal-agent theory provide the theoretical framework for the study, which examines 6334 articles published in six elite journals in the context of 21,442 articles in 41 core journals. The findings indicate that about 3.3% of academics have authored at least five articles (full-timers). These authors constitute the publishing core of the research community, while the 80% who have authored one article (part-timers) constitute its periphery.Higher Education(HE) andStudies in Higher Education(SHE) emerge as elite global journals, with an increasing share of non-Anglo-Saxon authors. Previously globally invisible countries became visible almost exclusively through HE and SHE. Global trends include the diminishing role of American researchers and the increasing role of researchers from Continental Europe, East Asia, and the cluster of 66 “other” countries. The single biggest affiliation loser is the United States, which had 42.5% of country affiliations in 1996–2003 but only 26.9% in 2012–2018. This reflects both the increasing share of non-American affiliations and the increasing yearly volume of HE and SHE publications, in which US academics tend not to publish massively. The two pivotal components of every science system, academic careers and resource allocation, are increasingly subject to publication-based evaluation, and policymakers have been emphasizing the impact of publications, usually operationalized through the journal impact factor (see the development of impact-oriented science policies in Shibayama and Baba 2015 ). Therefore, academics of all ranks determine their publication destination “strategically,” as indicated by a study of Japanese biology professors: It is essential for individual academics to improve publication metrics constantly to survive career filters throughout all career stages. In European countries with more competitive career structures and award and recognition systems, highly cited publications are increasingly important in personnel and funding decisions (Kwiek 2018c ). A large-scale global survey of academics in 21 countries resulted in similar conclusions, finding that more peripheral systems in the sample (e.g., Poland, Romania, Malaysia, Hong Kong, South Korea, and New Zealand) were heavily involved in various versions of performance-based research funding, with a research focus on hiring, promotion, and tenure systems (Shin et al. 2014 ). Elite journals and academic disciplines Empirical studies show that publication in elite journals remains the key determinant of scientific recognition in many disciplines. In the field of economics, for example, “publishing in T5 (top five journals) is the most effective means of improving one’s chances of obtaining tenure in all of the top 35 U.S. economics departments” (Heckman and Moktan 2018 : 6). Increasingly, the recognition In mathematics, top journal publications during the first four years of an individual’s academic career are the most important predictor of future research achievement (Lindahl 2018 : 531). A recent study of external assessment reports used for recruitment in four Swedish universities in biomedicine, economics, and history shows that the ability to publish in top journals is the most important evaluation criterion of careers in the first two fields, and top journals are mentioned in almost all reports and are often a clearly decisive factor. They maximize their individual productivity and competitive performance in three areas: top publications, grant funding, and citations—as internationally accepted and transferable tokens of academic quality. In their highly competitive environment, “failure to produce results that can be transformed into publications or grant money cannot be compensated, and equals career failure” (Fochler et al. 2016 : 196). Across Europe, expectations to publish in top journals are standard in national research funding agencies (Lyytinen et al. 2007 ), and they are an absolute must in the European Research Council (Rodríguez-Navarro and Brito 2019 ). Publication in elite journals and funding from prestigious agencies are crucial components of this credibility cycle (which refers to all academic cohorts; see Cruz-Castro and Sanz-Menéndes 2010 , who study the relationship between performance and rewards for early career researchers). Publication in top-tier journals increases European scientists’ chances of securing an academic position, moving up the career ladder more rapidly, attracting external funding, and becoming part of the well-networked global scientific elite. The theory of academic capitalism posits that Anglo-Saxon research-intensive universities reorient themselves to win this game (Taylor et al. 2016 ); research commonly takes priority over instruction, and the increase in public research funding further consolidates the prestige economy (Rosinger et al. 2016 ; Kandiko Howson et al. 2018 ). Across the world, national, institutional, and departmental policies, as well as research assessment exercises, prioritize publication in prestigious journals. Moreover, regular spot checks are run on aspects of author profiles, such as canonical names or affiliations.” Publications in author profiles have an average precision (i.e., ratio of publications correctly assigned to the author) of 98.1%, and the average recall, or the ratio of publications captured, is 94.4%. It is assumed in this study that the Scopus database fits research purposes well, following van den Besselaar and Sandström’s ( 2016 ) idea that different projects require different levels of data cleaning and disambiguation.