Extant literature has provided inconsistent evidence on whether engagements in university-industry interaction have positive or negative effects on individual researchers’ academic performance. This paper aims to investigate how short-term mobility of a researcher from university to industry affects individual research output, more specifically international and domestic journal publications. Official archival data were collected on a sample of 3524 academic researchers who participated in the Guangdong Technological Expert Secondment Program from 2008 to 2014. It was found that mobility has both positive and negative effects on individual academic performance, and the overall promoting effect is higher for international publications than for domestic ones. After mobility, the growth rate of international publications increases significantly, whereas the grow rate of domestic publications decreases dramatically. The positive effect of international journal publications of researcher in high-level institutions is greater than that of researcher at the general level, and the positive effect of international journal publications of researchers outside the province is greater than that of local researchers, These findings bear important practical implications for government policy, firm strategy, as well as university administration, on the tradeoffs of academic research and industrial engagement at the individual level.