Science Without Borders: A Descriptive Mobility Study

Abstract

The international student exchange market has grown significantly over the last decade. In an effort to improve the country's science and technology production, the Brazilian government created the Ciência sem Fronteiras program. The program provides funding for undergraduate and postgraduate students to study abroad. This paper analyzes data from this program, identifying patterns on distributions of students, their states in Brazil, destinations and areas of study. The results show that the long tail distribution appears ordinarily in the data. Furthermore, between pairs of data, the results showed that Quetelet's index was low in most cases, except in a few outliers, such as countries that have hosted a very small number of students.