The many faces of mobility: Using bibliometric data to measure the movement of scientists

Bilateral flows and rates of international migration of scholars for 210 countries for the period 1998-2020

A lack of comprehensive migration data is a major barrier for understanding the causes and consequences of migration processes, including for specific groups like high-skilled migrants. We leverage large-scale bibliometric data from Scopus and OpenAlex to trace the global movements of scholars. Based on our empirical validations, we develop pre-processing steps and offer best practices for the measurement and identification of migration events. We have prepared a publicly accessible dataset that shows a high level of correlation between the counts of scholars in Scopus and OpenAlex for most countries. Although OpenAlex has more extensive coverage of non-Western countries, the highest correlations with Scopus are observed in Western countries. We share aggregated yearly estimates of international migration rates and of bilateral flows for 210 countries and areas worldwide for the period 1998-2020 and describe the data structure and usage notes. We expect that the publicly shared dataset will enable researchers to further study the causes and the consequences of migration of scholars to forecast the future mobility of academic talent worldwide.

Democratic governance and global science: A longitudinal analysis of the international research collaboration network

The democracy-science relationship has traditionally been examined through philosophical conjecture and country case studies. There remains limited global-scale empirical research on the topic. This study explores country-level factors related to the dynamics of the global research collaboration network, focusing on structural associations between democratic governance and the strength of international research collaboration ties. This study combines longitudinal data on 170 countries between 2008 and 2017 from the Varieties of Democracy Institute, World Bank Indicators, Scopus, and Web of Science bibliometric data. Methods include descriptive network analysis, temporal exponential random graph models (TERGM), and valued exponential random graph models (VERGM). The results suggest significant positive effects of democratic governance on the formation and strength of international research collaboration ties and homophily between countries with similar levels of democratic governance. The results also show the importance of exogenous factors, such as GDP, population size, and geographical distance, as well as endogenous network factors, including preferential attachment and transitivity.

Reconceptualising international academic mobility in the global knowledge system: towards a new research agenda

The cross-border movement of people in higher education has been attracting scholarly attention for decades, but the definition of 'international academic mobility' bears ambiguities. This article reviews the literature on international academic mobility published in the journal Higher Education and beyond. By bridging the literature on international academic mobility from higher education studies and other disciplines, this article proposes to redefine international academic mobility, which highlights the integration of both international student mobility and international faculty mobility. Furthermore, this article outlines a new conceptual framework and research agenda, on the role of international academic mobility in the national, regional, and global knowledge systems. The framework highlights the relationship between international academic mobility and worldwide knowledge acquisition, production, transfer, circulation, networks, and the geopolitics of science. The article also proposes further methodologies for future research on international academic mobility.

Globalization of scientific communication: Evidence from authors in academic journals by country of origin

This study measures the tendency to publish in international scientific journals. For each of nearly 35,000 Scopus-indexed journals, we derive seven globalization indicators based on the composition of authors by country of origin and other characteristics. These are subsequently scaled up to the level of 174 countries and 27 disciplines between 2005 and 2017. The results indicate that advanced countries maintain high globalization of scientific communication that is not varying across disciplines. Social sciences and health sciences are less globalized than physical and life sciences. Countries of the former Soviet bloc score far lower on the globalization measures, especially in social sciences or health sciences. Russia remains among the least globalized during the whole period, with no upward trend. Contrary, China has profoundly globalized its science system, gradually moving from the lowest globalization figures to the world average. The article concludes with reflections on measurement issues and policy implications.

Why do papers from international collaborations get more citations? A bibliometric analysis of Library and Information Science papers

Scientific activity has become increasingly complex in recent years. The need for international research collaboration has thus become a common pattern in science. In this current landscape, countries face the problem of maintaining their competitiveness while cooperating with other countries to achieve relevant research outputs. In this international context, publications from international collaborations tend to achieve greater scientific impact than those from domestic ones. To design policies that improve the competitiveness of countries and organizations, it thus becomes necessary to understand the factors and mechanisms that influence the benefits and impact of international research. In this regard, the aim of this study is to confirm whether the differences in impact between international and domestic collaborations are affected by their topics and structure. To perform this study, we examined the Library and Information Science category of the Web of Science database between 2015 and 2019. A science mapping analysis approach was used to extract the themes and their structure according to collaboration type and in the whole category (2015–2019). We also looked for differences in these thematic aspects in top countries and in communities of collaborating countries. The results showed that the thematic factor influences the impact of international research, as the themes in this type of collaboration lie at the forefront of the Library and Information Science category (e.g., technologies such as artificial intelligence and social media are found in the category), while domestic collaborations have focused on more well-consolidated themes (e.g., academic libraries and bibliometrics). Organizations, countries, and communities of countries must therefore consider this thematic factor when designing strategies to improve their competitiveness and collaborate.

Connecting Scientometrics: Dimensions as a Route to Broadening Context for Analyses

Modern cloud-based data infrastructures open new vistas for the deployment of scientometric data into the hands of practitioners. These infrastructures lower barriers to entry by making data more available and compute capacity more affordable. In addition, if data are prepared appropriately, with unique identifiers, it is possible to connect many different types of data. Bringing broader world data into the hands of practitioners (policymakers, strategists, and others) who use scientometrics as a tool can extend their capabilities. These ideas are explored through connecting Dimensions and World Bank data on Google BigQuery to study international collaboration between countries of different economic classification.

Return migration of German-affiliated researchers: analyzing departure and return by gender, cohort, and discipline using Scopus bibliometric data 1996–2020

The international migration of researchers is an important dimension of scientific mobility, and has been the subject of considerable policy debate. However, tracking the migration life courses of researchers is challenging due to data limitations. In this study, we use Scopus bibliometric data on eight million publications from 1.1 million researchers who have published at least once with an affiliation address from Germany in 1996–2020. We construct the partial life histories of published researchers in this period and explore both their out-migration and the subsequent return of a subset of this group: the returnees. Our analyses shed light on the career stages and gender disparities between researchers who remain in Germany, those who emigrate, and those who eventually return. We find that the return migration streams are even more gender imbalanced, which points to the need for additional efforts to encourage female researchers to come back to Germany. We document a slightly declining trend in return migration among more recent cohorts of researchers who left Germany, which, for most disciplines, was associated with a decrease in the German collaborative ties of these researchers. Moreover, we find that the gender disparities for the most gender imbalanced disciplines are unlikely to be mitigated by return migration given the gender compositions of the cohorts of researchers who have left Germany and of those who have returned. This analysis uncovers new dimensions of migration among scholars by investigating the return migration of published researchers, which is critical for the development of science policy.

International mobility activities predict research output: A longitudinal study

A 4-year data set of 274 scientists and technical staff in a Chinese university's physics department was constructed to study the impact of going on international visits (visit) and inviting international scholars (invite) on researchers' academic output. Results showed visit frequency significantly predicted output quantity and quality whereas invites significantly predicted output quantity, but not its quality. Visit/invite frequencies significantly predicted long-term output through short-term output, giving direct proof to their enduring promotion effect on innovation. Visits predicted far-future output through near-future visits whereas invites did not lead to more invites in promoting output. Age moderated the relationship between visits/invites and output. This study provided new evidence on the behavioral and psychological process of international mobility and its impact on research output.

The link between ethnic diversity and scientific impact: the mediating effect of novelty and audience diversity

Understanding the nature and value of scientific collaboration is essential for sound management and proactive research policies. One component of collaboration is the composition and diversity of contributing authors. This study explores how ethnic diversity in scientific collaboration affects scientific impact, by presenting a conceptual model to connect ethnic diversity, based on author names, with scientific impact, assuming novelty and audience diversity as mediators. The model also controls for affiliated country diversity and affiliated country size. Using path modeling, we apply the model to the Web of Science subject categories Nanoscience & Nanotechnology, Ecology and Information Science & Library. For all three subject categories, and regardless of if control variables are considered or not, we find a weak positive relationship between ethnic diversity and scientific impact. The relationship is weaker, however, when control variables are included. For all three fields, the mediated effect through audience diversity is substantially stronger than the mediated effect through novelty in the relationship, and the former effect is much stronger than the direct effect between the ethnic diversity and scientific impact. Our findings further suggest that ethnic diversity is more associated with short-term scientific impact compared to long-term scientific impact.

Evolutions and trends of artificial intelligence (AI): research, output, influence and competition

Purpose

This paper throws light on some of the nature of artificial intelligence (AI) development, which will serve as a starter for helping to advance its development.

Design/methodology/approach

This work reveals the evolutions and trends of AI from four dimensions: research, output, influence and competition through leveraging academic knowledge graph with 130,750 AI scholars and 43,746 scholarly articles.

Findings

The authors unearth that the “research convergence” phenomenon becomes more evident in current AI research for scholars' highly similar research interests in different regions. The authors notice that Pareto's principle applies to AI scholars' outputs, and the outputs have been increasing at an explosive rate in the past two decades. The authors discover that top works dominate the AI academia, for they attracted considerable attention. Finally, the authors delve into AI competition, which accelerates technology development, talent flow, and collaboration.

Originality/value

The work aims to throw light on the nature of AI development, which will serve as a starter for helping to advance its development. The work will help us to have a more comprehensive and profound understanding of the evolutions and trends, which bridge the gap between literature research and AI development as well as enlighten the way the authors promote AI development and its strategy formulation.

Brain drain and brain gain in Russia: Analyzing international migration of researchers by discipline using Scopus bibliometric data 1996–2020

We study international mobility in academia, with a focus on the migration of published researchers to and from Russia. Using an exhaustive set of over 2.4 million Scopus publications, we analyze all researchers who have published with a Russian affiliation address in Scopus-indexed sources in 1996–2020. The migration of researchers is observed through the changes in their affiliation addresses, which altered their mode countries of affiliation across different years. While only 5.2% of these researchers were internationally mobile, they accounted for a substantial proportion of citations. Our estimates of net migration rates indicate that while Russia was a donor country in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it has experienced a relatively balanced circulation of researchers in more recent years. These findings suggest that the current trends in scholarly migration in Russia could be better framed as brain circulation, rather than as brain drain. Overall, researchers emigrating from Russia outnumbered and outperformed researchers immigrating to Russia. Our analysis on the subject categories of publication venues shows that in the past 25 years, Russia has, overall, suffered a net loss in most disciplines, and most notably in the five disciplines of neuroscience, decision sciences, mathematics, biochemistry, and pharmacology. We demonstrate the robustness of our main findings under random exclusion of data and changes in numeric parameters. Our substantive results shed light on new aspects of international mobility in academia, and on the impact of this mobility on a national science system, which have direct implications for policy development. Methodologically, our novel approach to handling big data can be adopted as a framework of analysis for studying scholarly migration in other countries.

Recognizing New Trends in Brain Drain Studies in the Framework of Global Sustainability

Scholars had been documenting the Brain Drain phenomenon producing scientific literature for more than 50 years. After three decades of slow but steady progress, literature about this concept has accelerated its progress and growth path, in line with the 9th sustainable development goal “Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation” Thus, the present article aims to define the current theoretical trends about the analysis of advanced intellectual human capital’s international migratory phenomenon. This study uses a scientometric methodology on a corpus of 1212 articles indexed to the JCR-WoS from Social Sciences. The period covered in the study is from 1965 to 2020. The paper looks to understand how researchers studied the brain drain concept over the last 55 years in various disciplines. The report covers 99 categories from the Journal Citation Report (JCR) index. Results show that there is a scientific research critical mass that is studying the brain drain phenomenon. The analysis shows thematic trends at the sources, discourses, and consolidates classic works and some novel authors. Those new scholars and theoretical trends lead to refocused analysis beyond countries with a high development level. Such movement constitutes a new challenge in this line of research toward studying the effects of the brain drain in the peripheral areas of knowledge production.

What effects does international mobility have on scientists’ careers? A systematic review

The internationalization and specialization of science confront scientists with opportunities and sometimes even a need to become internationally mobile during their careers. Against this background, we systematically reviewed empirical studies on the effects that mobility across national borders has on the careers of scientists. Using several search channels, we identified 96 studies – published between 1994 and 2019 – that examine how international mobility influences eight dimensions of scientists’ careers. Listed in descending order of the number of identified studies, these dimensions comprise scientists’ (1) international networks, (2) scientific productivity, (3) occupational situation, (4) scientific impact, (5) competences and personality, (6) scientific knowledge, (7) access to research infrastructures and funds, and (8) symbolic capital. Existing research provides robust evidence of positive effects of international mobility on the broadening of scientists’ networks. Moreover, several solid studies examine the effect of international mobility on scientists’ productivity, impact, and occupational situation. Most of them find positive effects, but some also find no or negative effects. Studies on the other career dimensions are not only less frequent, but mostly also less robust. Our review reveals potential to advance research in the field by using less selective samples and more rigorous methodological approaches. Intending to spur further theory-driven empirical research, we develop a model integrating research on the identified career dimensions and derive various questions for future research. We conclude by highlighting policy implications of existing research.

Industrial Processes Management for a Sustainable Society: Global Research Analysis

Few decades ago, the development of the industrial sector was disconnected from society’s protection. Negative effects awareness emerges from the current industrial processes through the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), considering the causal implications to build up a more sustainable society. The aim of this study is to analyze the state of the art in industrial processes management to obtain positive and sustainable effects on society. Thus, a bibliometric analysis of 1911 articles was set up during the 1988–2019 period, bringing up the authors’ productivity indicators in the scientific field, that is, journals, authors, research institutions, and countries. We have identified environmental management; the impact assessments of industrial processes on the environment and its relation with a more sustainable society; as well as the study of the sustainable management of water resources as the related axes in the study of environmental protection with political, economic, and educational approaches. The growing trend of world scientific publications let us observe the relevance of industrial processes management in the implementation of efficient models to achieve sustainable societies. This research contributes to the academic, scientific, and social debate on decision-making both in public and private institutions, and in multidisciplinary groups.

Transfer of knowledge through international scientific mobility: Introduction of a network-based bibliometric approach to study different knowledge types

Although international mobility is associated with various positive outcomes, the process of knowledge transfer resulting from working abroad has not yet been sufficiently investigated. The main reason why the relationship between international mobility and knowledge transfer is still underresearched is that there are not yet reliable methods to identify knowledge transfer. The current study aims to close this research gap by introducing a network-based approach that is capable of indicating knowledge flows. Assuming that coauthorship constitutes one instance through which knowledge transfer can take place, the approach relies on coauthorship networks. In the first approach to be presented, the transfer of published knowledge is operationalized as the use of rarely cited publications. In the second approach, the transfer of methodological know-how is operationalized as the occurrence of lexical terms in abstracts of publications. The study focuses on German scientists who were internationally mobile and acted as knowledge transmitters between the country of mobility and Germany. The results show that the network-based approach is well suited to identifying the sources of knowledge, knowledge transmitters, and the recipients of knowledge. Moreover, the findings suggest that knowledge transfer processes are field specific.

Web of Science as a data source for research on scientific and scholarly activity

Web of Science (WoS) is the world’s oldest, most widely used and authoritative database of research publications and citations. Based on the Science Citation Index, founded by Eugene Garfield in 1964, it has expanded its selective, balanced, and complete coverage of the world’s leading research to cover around 34,000 journals today. A wide range of use cases are supported by WoS from daily search and discovery by researchers worldwide through to the supply of analytical data sets and the provision of specialized access to raw data for bibliometric partners. A long- and well-established network of such partners enables the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) to continue to work closely with bibliometric groups around the world to the benefit of both the community and the services that the company provides to researchers and analysts.