Presenter: 

Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

Discussant:

Abstract

An increasing number of literature focus on scholarly mobility among countries worldwide. Many studies look at specific national cases. But, contrasting the movement of scholars “within” sub-national regions of countries versus “between” the national borders is understudied.

We re-purposed large-scale bibliometric data on more than 30 million “article” and “review” publications from Scopus in 1996 to 2020 and geo-coded the affiliation addresses.

We prepared the first global database of migration of scholars at the level of internal migration within countries, and at the level of international migration. It enables us to study the connection between international migration from specific sub-regions within a country. Our results show that looking at sub-national regions instead of countries, doubles the share of mobile scholars from 8% to 16%. Some sub-national regions are attractive destinations for international and some for national mobility. We show examples worldwide, from the USA, Germany, France, Canada and Italy. We further highlight the role that scientific collaborations play in facilitating future scholarly mobility. Scholars form ties before or during their mobility events and some of these ties persist and facilitate future moves. We discuss the implications of our results on the global circulation of talent and high-skilled mobility.

REGISTRATION CLOSED