Abstract: This paper creates a dataset of articles published from 1998 to 2018 in all the peer-reviewed journals of management CSSCI, based on theoretical analysis and modeling, it empirically analyzes the role of scholars' openness on their academic impact. The results show that there is a nonlinear relationship between scholars' openness and academic impact, which is positive before a certain point, and then becomes negative. By introducing the moderating variable career age (AGE), the research also finds that moderate cognitive openness and structural openness are desirable for enhancing academic impact for young scholars; besides, a high level of cognitive openness and a low level of structural openness contribute to senior scholars’ academic impact. The research contributes to understanding of different search behavior across business scholars’ career paths, and has some theoretical references on how to improve the academic impact of scholars.