This paper addresses the mobility of scientists and its implications for countries with weaker scientific and technological systems. It focuses on the "return dilemma" and, using the Portuguese case as empirical setting, discusses the conditions for return, the diaspora option and the role of policies in minimising the impacts of unbalanced flows. We propose a method to identify and locate key expatriate scientists (a basic problem in mobility research) and conduct an exploratory application of that methodology in a specific field, in order to collect some information on scientists' trajectories as well as gaining some preliminary insights on their attitudes towards the home country.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.