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

Abstract

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.

Research network propagation: The impact of PhD students’ temporary international mobility

“…A comprehensive database assembled from Scopus including detailed information (at the paper level) on research networks was developed for both the authors (PhD students) and their coauthors (including supervisors at the home and hosting institutions) to identify publications resulting from collaborations established during the period abroad. Following the literature (e.g., Aman, 2020;Cattaneo, Malighetti, & Paleari, 2019;Forti, Franzoni, & Sobrero, 2013; Gaule & Piacentini, 2013), matching errors in the bibliometric data set were minimized using a disambiguation algorithm to retrieve authors' Scopus numerical identifiers. A specific ID was associated with a doctoral student if the following criteria were met: (a) The last and the first name of the doctoral student corresponded to that reported in the survey; (b) the last and the first name of one coauthor corresponded to the name of the doctoral student's home supervisor reported in the survey; (c) the university and departmental (if any) affiliation name was correct; and (d) the subject area of the majority of indexed products corresponded to the specific author ID.…”

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.…”

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

“…For example, Bäker (2015) reports that researchers in disciplines with both quantitative and qualitative research methods (pluralistic) are more likely to lose their human capital after changing affiliation, because of the diversity in research approaches. Aman (2020) measured the knowledge transmission among mobile and non-mobile researchers and discovered highest knowledge transmission in "Earth and Planetary Sciences" and "Neurosciences". Depending on the size and domain of used data, prior studies have mentioned different proportions of mobility across disciplines.…”