Travel bans and scientific mobility: utility of asymmetry and affinity indexes to inform science policy

Abstract

This study explores the international profiles in collaboration and mobility of countries included in the so-called ''travel bans'' implemented by US President Trump as executive order in 2017. The objective of this research is to analyze the exchange of knowledge between countries and the relative importance of specific countries in order to inform evidence-based science policy. The work serves as a proof-of-concept of the utility of asymmetry and affinity indexes for collaboration and mobility. Comparative analyses of these indicators can be useful for informing immigration policies and motivating collaboration and mobility relationships-emphasizing the importance of geographic and cultural similarities. Egocentric and relational perspectives are analyzed to provide various lenses on the importance of countries. Our analysis suggests that comparisons of

Global village or virtual balkans? evolution and performance of scientific collaboration in the information age

“…Therefore, our findings have important implications for scholars, institution administrators, and national policy makers. For scholars, especially individuals from general‐tier institutions, our findings support that the development of ICTs benefits them more, while they are often lacking in research resources and facing greater mobility constraints due to the internal or external political environment (Chinchilla‐Rodríguez et al, ). For administrators of general‐tier institutions, our findings suggest that ICTs could be employed to reach distant potential collaborators and connect to top‐tier institutions, which helps them to narrow the physical and nonphysical gaps among other scientists.…”

“…Previous studies have shown that the international migration and mobility of researchers has significant influence on their productivity and scientific collaboration (Jonkers & Tijssen, 2008;Marmolejo-Leyva, Perez-Angon, & Russell, 2015). Nevertheless, a recent study suggested that the mobility of scientists was vulnerable to the immigration policies and the political environment, and investigated the collaboration and mobility of countries in the "travel bans" implemented by U.S. President Trump in 2017 (Chinchilla-Rodríguez, Bu, Robinson-García, Costas, & Sugimoto, 2018). Therefore, we expect that geographic barriers might still play important roles in scientific collaboration and it is necessary to know the geographic pattern of scientific collaboration for scholars and policy makers.…”

A Global Comparison of Scientific Mobility and Collaboration According to National Scientific Capacities

“…Collaborative partnerships have been shown to be a product of self-organizing networks, in which coauthorships are determined through preferential attachment to high impact and highly visible authors (Wagner and Leydesdorff, 2005). Collaboration is also influenced by socio-political factors, such as relative size; geographical, historical, linguistic, and thematic proximity; and other socio-economic characteristics (Zitt et al, 2000;Adams et al, 2014;Finardi and Buratti, 2016;Chinchilla-Rodríguez et al, 2018b).…”

The structure and evolution of scientific collaboration from the perspective of symbiosis

“…Since then, bibliometric indicators have been widely applied in the research of scientific collaboration networks (e.g., Bu et al 2018b;Cavusoglu and Turker 2014;Chinchilla-Rodríguez et al 2018;Wang et al 2015). Social network analysis has also proven to be very effective for analyzing and visualizing co-authorship networks (e.g., Huerta-Barrientos et al 2014;Otte and Rousseau 2002;White 2003;Kretschmer and Aguillo 2004).…”