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

Abstract

This paper presents a methodological framework for developing scientific mobility indicators based on bibliometric data. We identify nearly 16 million individual authors from publications covered in the Web of Science for the 2008-2015 period. Based on the information provided across individuals' publication records, we propose a general classification for analyzing scientific mobility using institutional affiliation changes. We distinguish between migrants--authors who have ruptures with their country of origin--and travelers--authors who gain additional affiliations while maintaining affiliation with their country of origin. We find that 3.7% of researchers who have published at least one paper over the period are mobile.Paper accepted for publication in Journal of Informetrics 2 Travelers represent 72.7% of all mobile scholars, but migrants have higher scientific impact. We apply this classification at the country level, expanding the classification to incorporate the directionality of scientists' mobility (i.e., incoming and outgoing). We provide a brief analysis to highlight the utility of the proposed taxonomy to study scholarly mobility and discuss the implications for science policy.

The Demography of the Peripatetic Researcher: Evidence on Highly Mobile Scholars from the Web of Science

“…Figure 1 shows that the USA and China were the most common and the second-most common countries of academic origin, while this order was reversed for the destinations of the super-movers. When we take the relationship between mobility and scientific impact into account [22,26], we find that our observations for the USA and China are consistent with a Nature survey of 2,300 respondents [32], which showed that although the USA has historically been the country with the greatest scientific impact, China is expected to have the greatest impact in 2020. Also in Figure 1, we can see that England and Germany were, respectively, the third-and fourth-most common countries of origin and countries of destination.…”

“…This is the initial step in establishing a longitudinal dataset on the mobility of researchers across all research fields, and in different disciplines. Observing, consistent with the literature [22], that more than 90% of the researchers showed no signs of international mobility, we focus on the small fraction of scholars whose main affiliation track indicates that they moved across international borders. In particular, we focus on researchers whose Web of Science publication data show that they have published with main affiliation addresses from at least three distinct countries, which we consider an indication that they made more than one international move.…”

“…A key advantage of using bibliometric data for studying the mobility of researchers is the availability of millions of publications in bibliometric databases, such as Web of Science [22], Scopus [2], and Dimensions [27]. Each publication serves as a data point that indicates the addresses of the authors on a certain publication date.…”

“…This time lag prevents us from observing mobility events at the exact point in time when they occurred. Our analysis and results were solely based on main affiliation (as opposed to considering multiple affiliations [22]) which does not always represent the actual geographic location of a researcher. Furthermore, we are unable to observe and track international mobility not represented in Web of Science publication data, which are known to be biased toward certain languages, and to underrepresent certain countries [25].…”

“…In the global economy, highly skilled migration [9] and the mobility of researchers [4] have become central issues for research and policy. The interest in these issues is reflected in numerous studies that have investigated the mobility of researchers across countries [5,10,17,[19][20][21][22]26,30]. In this article, we focus on the movements of researchers as a subcategory of mobility processes among highly educated people, which have far-reaching consequences for the exchange of knowledge and the development of new ideas, as well as for the emergence of competitive advantages for the countries involved in the resulting circulation of knowledge.…”