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

Abstract

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.

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

“…Not only is this research going to contribute to the literature on migration of researchers [3,26,29,30,[48][49][50][51][52] in the context of Germany [10,53,54], but more importantly it will fill a critical gap in scholarly return migration as a novel subject in bibliometric analysis of academic migration. This work is a continuation of [10] with a focus on policy-relevant descriptive analysis of return migration among researchers, by taking levels of experience, gender, disciplines, and cohorts into account.…”

“…To detect migration events more reliably, the most frequent (mode) country(ies) of affiliation is extracted for each researcher in each year. A migration event is considered to have happened only if the mode country of affiliation changes for the researcher across different years [29]. Accordingly, the country of academic origin (country of academic destination) is defined as the mode country during the first (last) year of publishing.…”

The many facets of academic mobility and its impact on scholars' career

“…Cañibano et al (2011) analysed a set of 10,000 PhD holders in Spain from Scientific Information System of Andalusia dataset (SICA) and reported the most international mobility in "social sciences" and "science and technology of health" as the least mobile discipline. In contrast, Subbotin and Aref (2021) found that Russian scientists have the most and least international mobility in Physical Sciences and Social Sciences, respectively.…”

“…By applying a bibliometric approach, we can track the mobility of researchers through their publications. Some studies have already investigated international academic mobility in a similar way (Aman, 2018a;El-Ouahi et al, 2021;Petersen, 2018;Robinson-Garcia et al, 2019;Subbotin & Aref, 2021). Table 1 summarizes the notable related studies in terms of academic mobility and the features they considered as well as the scope of analysed data.…”

Attracting highly skilled migrants to the Russian regions

“…Recruiting highly skilled specialists is essential for developing countries and regions with ‘brain drain’ (Dezhina, 1996; Graham & Dezhina, 2008; Parsons et al, 2020; Simanovskiĭ et al, 1996; Straubhaar, 2000). Russia has been a net exporter of scientists in most disciplines for many years; some recent government programmes have helped reduce the outflow (Subbotin & Aref, 2021). For example, Project 5–100, launched in 2012, was assigned to improve the position of the leading Russian universities in the global research and education markets (Kosyakov & Guskov, 2019).…”