Article

Homecoming After Brexit: Evidence on Academic Migration From Bibliometric Data

Authors:
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.

Abstract

This study assesses the initial effects of the 2016 Brexit referendum on the mobility of academic scholars to and from the United Kingdom (UK). We leverage bibliometric data from millions of Scopus publications to infer changes in the countries of residence of published researchers by the changes in their institutional affiliations over time. We focus on a selected sample of active and internationally mobile researchers whose movements are traceable for every year between 2013 and 2019 and measure the changes in their migration patterns. Although we do not observe a brain drain following Brexit, we find evidence that scholars’ mobility patterns changed after Brexit. Among the active researchers in our sample, their probability of leaving the UK increased by approximately 86% if their academic origin (country of first publication) was an EU country. For scholars with a UK academic origin, their post-Brexit probability of leaving the UK decreased by approximately 14%, and their probability of moving (back) to the UK increased by roughly 65%. Our analysis points to a compositional change in the academic origins of the researchers entering and leaving the UK as one of the first impacts of Brexit on the UK and EU academic workforce.

No full-text available

Request Full-text Paper PDF

To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.

Article
Full-text available
The international migration of researchers is an important dimension of scientific mobility, and has been the subject of considerable policy debate. However, tracking the migration life courses of researchers is challenging due to data limitations. In this study, we use Scopus bibliometric data on eight million publications from 1.1 million researchers who have published at least once with an affiliation address from Germany in 1996–2020. We construct the partial life histories of published researchers in this period and explore both their out-migration and the subsequent return of a subset of this group: the returnees. Our analyses shed light on the career stages and gender disparities between researchers who remain in Germany, those who emigrate, and those who eventually return. We find that the return migration streams are even more gender imbalanced, which points to the need for additional efforts to encourage female researchers to come back to Germany. We document a slightly declining trend in return migration among more recent cohorts of researchers who left Germany, which, for most disciplines, was associated with a decrease in the German collaborative ties of these researchers. Moreover, we find that the gender disparities for the most gender imbalanced disciplines are unlikely to be mitigated by return migration given the gender compositions of the cohorts of researchers who have left Germany and of those who have returned. This analysis uncovers new dimensions of migration among scholars by investigating the return migration of published researchers, which is critical for the development of science policy.
Article
Full-text available
We study international mobility in academia, with a focus on the migration of published researchers to and from Russia. Using an exhaustive set of over 2.4 million Scopus publications, we analyze all researchers who have published with a Russian affiliation address in Scopus-indexed sources in 1996–2020. The migration of researchers is observed through the changes in their affiliation addresses, which altered their mode countries of affiliation across different years. While only 5.2% of these researchers were internationally mobile, they accounted for a substantial proportion of citations. Our estimates of net migration rates indicate that while Russia was a donor country in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it has experienced a relatively balanced circulation of researchers in more recent years. These findings suggest that the current trends in scholarly migration in Russia could be better framed as brain circulation, rather than as brain drain. Overall, researchers emigrating from Russia outnumbered and outperformed researchers immigrating to Russia. Our analysis on the subject categories of publication venues shows that in the past 25 years, Russia has, overall, suffered a net loss in most disciplines, and most notably in the five disciplines of neuroscience, decision sciences, mathematics, biochemistry, and pharmacology. We demonstrate the robustness of our main findings under random exclusion of data and changes in numeric parameters. Our substantive results shed light on new aspects of international mobility in academia, and on the impact of this mobility on a national science system, which have direct implications for policy development. Methodologically, our novel approach to handling big data can be adopted as a framework of analysis for studying scholarly migration in other countries.
Article
Full-text available
The migration of scholars is a major driver of innovation and of diffusion of knowledge. Although large-scale bibliometric data have been used to measure international migration of scholars, our understanding of internal migration among researchers is very limited. This is partly due to a lack of data aggregated at a suitable sub-national level. In this study, we analyze internal migration in Mexico based on over 1.1 million authorship records from the Scopus database. We trace the movements of scholars between Mexican states, and provide key demographic measures of internal migration for the 1996–2018 period. From a methodological perspective, we develop a new framework for enhancing data quality, inferring states from affiliations, and detecting moves from modal states for the purposes of studying internal migration among researchers. Substantively, we combine demographic and network science techniques to improve our understanding of internal migration patterns within country boundaries. The migration patterns between states in Mexico appear to be heterogeneous in size and direction across regions. However, while many scholars remain in their regions, there seems to be a preference for Mexico City and the surrounding states as migration destinations. We observed that over the past two decades, there has been a general decreasing trend in the crude migration intensity. However, the migration network has become more dense and more diverse, and has included greater exchanges between states along the Gulf and the Pacific Coast. Our analysis, which is mostly empirical in nature, lays the foundations for testing and developing theories that can rely on the analytical framework developed by migration scholars, and the richness of appropriately processed bibliometric data.
Article
Full-text available
The relationship between the international mobility of academic researchers and social capital is complex. On the one hand, the literature suggests that social capital facilitates the international mobility of academics which, in turn, promotes the accumulation of international social capital, enhances research productivity, and advances careers. On the other hand, international mobility can isolate researchers from the national social capital in their origin countries. In this paper, I present the results of 42 interviews in Canada and Germany to examine how academics in both countries have experienced the connection between international mobility and social capital. In addition to revealing the complexity of this connection, the results show that social capital facilitates international mobility and that mobility sometimes creates social capital. However, mobility can also lead to the loss of national social capital that negatively affects early-career researchers in particular.
Article
Full-text available
The disambiguation of author names is an important and challenging task in bibliometrics. We propose an approach that relies on an external source of information for selecting and validating clusters of publications identified through an unsupervised author name disambiguation method. The application of the proposed approach to a random sample of Italian scholars shows encouraging results, with an overall precision, recall, and F-measure of over 96%. The proposed approach can serve as a starting point for large-scale census of publication portfolios for bibliometric analyses at the level of individual researchers.
Article
Full-text available
In this paper I outline how author identifiers enable to track international mobility of scientists. Authorship systems help to distinguish among similar names and provide information on affiliations and thus countries of stay. This study explores the relation between CV data and Scopus data in regard to tracking international mobility of scientists. To test the consistency and applicability of data on mobility episodes, residence countries as provided in CVs of a set of German scientists were compared against country information in the affiliations of their publications. Therefore, the CVs of Leibniz laureates were coded for the period 1996–2015 and their publications were gathered on the basis of Scopus author ID. Results show that the majority of scientists under study have a single author ID (68.4%). However, there are laureates with so-called ‘split identities’ where more than one author ID exists. Most of them have a dominant author ID that covers the majority of their publications and one or more additional IDs with only a few publications causing these split identities. Recall statistic shows that the use of the dominant author ID of each laureate would result in around 97% of their publication output. In contrast, the precision of Scopus author ID proves to be high. A random sample shows that all publications assigned to a specific author ID relate to a single individual, so that the precision statistic would yield 100%. Further results show that the registry systems ORCID and ResearcherID are no alternatives to Scopus author ID, because a minority of laureates make use of these identifier systems and data is often incomplete. Unlike ORCID and ResearcherID that suffer from a selection bias as those scientists who remain in science maintain their author profiles, Scopus author ID exists for every author publishing in sources covered by Scopus. The comparison of mobility data in Scopus versus CV data shows that bibliometric data is suitable to identify a scientist’s international mobility and appears to be a good solution if there are no CVs available or if they are incomplete. Furthermore, the reasons for inconsistencies in mobility data are discussed. These mainly reside in the lack of co-author affiliations, incomplete CV data, and other minor reasons.
Article
Full-text available
This study compares the flows of mobile researchers and the number of publications in international collaboration within the context of scientific and economic capacities. The goal is to identify the convergence or discrepancy of countries in mobility and collaboration and determine the positions and relative influence of countries in both processes. Using affiliation data from scientific publications, we analyze the distributions and networks of collaboration and mobility and their structural differences. The results show that there is a significant relationship between the flow of mobile researchers and the capacity for publishing with foreign partners in the more prolific countries, although mobility is always lower than collaboration. Size matters and scientific relationship are highly resource-dependent. Advanced and Proficient countries accumulate the highest proportion of the mobile authors and international publications with an extremely low representation of mobility in Developing and Lagging countries. In addition, the placement of countries is not always consistent in both networks, revealing distinct roles of mobility and collaboration, with particular instability for lower income countries. The more resources available in a country (both scientific and economic) the greater the likelihood of attracting foreign partners and mobilizing human capital. The policy relevance of these structural differences are described and a brief description of the limitations and future research are provided.
Article
Full-text available
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 collaboration and mobility from an affinity perspective can identify discrepancies between levels of collaboration and mobility. This approach can inform international immigration policies and, if extended, demonstrate potential partnerships at several levels of analysis (e.g., institutional, sectoral, state/province).
Article
Full-text available
An analysis of researchers' global mobility reveals that limiting the circulation of scholars will damage the scientific system, say Cassidy R.
Article
Full-text available
The 2004/2007 European Union (EU) enlargement by 12 member states offers a unique opportunity to quantify the impact of EU efforts to expand and integrate the scientific competitiveness of the European Research Area (ERA). We apply two causal estimation schemes to cross-border collaboration data extracted from millions of academic publications from 1996 to 2012, which are disaggregated across 14 subject areas and 32 European countries. Our results illustrate the unintended consequences following the 2004/2007 enlargement, namely, its negative impact on cross-border collaboration in science. First, we use the synthetic control method to show that levels of European cross-border collaboration would have been higher without EU enlargement, despite the 2004/2007 EU entrants gaining access to EU resources incentivizing cross-border integration. Second, we implement a difference-in-difference panel regression, incorporating official intra-European high-skilled mobility statistics, to identify migration imbalance—principally from entrant to incumbent EU member states—as a major factor underlying the divergence in cross-border integration between Western and Eastern Europe. These results challenge central tenets underlying ERA integration policies that unifying labor markets will increase the international competitiveness of the ERA, thereby calling attention to the need for effective home-return incentives and policies.
Article
Full-text available
Demography, the official journal of the Population Association of America, has been given the highest rating among demographic journals by the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). Our aim here is to investigate the development of research subfields and female authorship in Demography over the last 50 years. We find that female authorship in Demography has risen considerably since the 1980s and that currently a woman is about as likely as a man to be the sole or the first author of a paper published in the journal. However, we find some differences by subfield. Women seem to be overrepresented in the “family and household” research subfield but underrepresented in the “mortality and health” and “data and methods” categories.
Article
Full-text available
International scientific mobility is acknowledged to be a key mechanism for the diffusion of knowledge, particularly tacit or 'sticky' knowledge that cannot be transferred without geographical proximity and personal contact, for the incorporation of young researchers into elite transnational scientific networks, and for accessing additional resources or infrastructures that are essential to the research process but located in other places. The inadequacy and lack of appropriate data to assess the phenomenon of researcher mobility has been repeatedly pointed out by scholars and policy makers. This paper presents an exploratory analysis of different typologies of researchers according to their traceable mobility using scientific publications covered in the Web of Science (WoS). We compare two populations of researchers, of the same 'scientific age', based in Spain and The Netherlands. We observe differences in the degree of mobility of Spain and Netherlands based researchers. Factors associated with the different institutional conditions characterizing the two national systems need to be taken into account. First, the Spanish and Dutch university and research systems are different in many ways. Second, there may be very different institutional incentives for mobility in the two systems. More sophisticated bibliometric analyses and comparisons with different 'generations' of researchers, possibly combined with qualitative investigation, will be required to better understand the role and function of national institutional context in both research mobility and research careers.
Chapter
Full-text available
The circulation of scientists is a global phenomenon. Yet there is virtually no data that allow for consistent comparisons of mobility patterns across countries among the PhD trained. The GlobSci survey was designed to do precisely this by providing consistent cross-country data on active researchers working in four fields of science. The survey was administered in 2011 to 47,304 active researchers in 16 countries. The response rate was approximately 40%. This chapter summarizes findings based on the survey. Included is a discussion of the incidence of foreign-born scientists, returnees, and nonmobile natives across countries; the main source countries supplying foreign-born talent; the reasons scientists give for the decision to study or work abroad; the role mobile scientists play in international networks; and the degree to which a performance premium is attached to mobility. Suggestions for future research using the data, which will be made available to researchers in 2015, are also included.
Article
Full-text available
In recent years, sociological research on cosmopolitanism has begun to draw on Pierre Bourdieu to critically examine how cosmopolitanism is implicated in stratification on an increasingly global scale. In this paper, we examine the analytical potential of the Bourdieusian approach by exploring how education systems help to institutionalize cosmopolitanism as cultural capital whose access is rendered structurally unequal. To this end, we first probe how education systems legitimate cosmopolitanism as a desirable disposition at the global level, while simultaneously distributing it unequally among different groups of actors according to their geographical locations and volumes of economic, cultural, and social capital their families possess. We then explore how education systems undergird profitability of cosmopolitanism as cultural capital by linking academic qualifications that signal cosmopolitan dispositions with the growing number of positions that require extensive interactions with people of multiple nationalities.
Article
Full-text available
Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the historical development of scientometrics, sources of citation data, citation metrics and the "laws" of scientometrics, normalisation, journal impact factors and other journal metrics, visualising and mapping science, evaluation and policy, and future developments.
Article
Full-text available
A bibliometric approach is explored to tracking international scientific migration, based on an analysis of the affiliation countries of authors publishing in peer reviewed journals indexed in ScopusTM. The paper introduces a model that relates base concepts in the study of migration to bibliometric constructs, and discusses the potentialities and limitations of a bibliometric approach both with respect to data accuracy and interpretation. Synchronous and asynchronous analyses are presented for 10 rapidly growing countries and 7 scientifically established countries. Rough error rates of the proposed indicators are estimated. It is concluded that the bibliometric approach is promising provided that its outcomes are interpreted with care, based on insight into the limits and potentialities of the approach, and combined with complementary data, obtained, for instance, from researchers’ Curricula Vitae o, survey or questionnaire- based data. Error rates for units of assessment with indicator values based on sufficiently large numbers are estimated to be fairly below 10 %, but can be expected to vary substantially among countries of origin, especially between Asian countries and Western countries.
Article
Full-text available
Cassidy R. Sugimoto and colleagues present a bibliometric analysis confirming that gender imbalances persist in research output worldwide.
Article
Full-text available
Migrant scientists outperform domestic scientists. The result persists after instrumenting migration for reasons of work or study with migration in childhood to minimize the effect of selection. The results are consistent with theories of knowledge recombination and specialty matching.
Article
Full-text available
Recent data on the comparative scientific performance of different nations suggest that the decline in British basic science apparent during the 1970s began to level off at the start of the 1980s. However, rather than heralding the beginning of a revival, the evidence suggests that this is merely a temporary halt to the long-term slide.
Article
Full-text available
In previous articles, the author and his colleagues have shown that British science declined relative to other countries during the 1970 and more slowly during the early 1980s. More recently, the author examined figures for 1981–85 produced by the Information Science and Scientometrics Research Unit (ISSRU) and showed that they were consistent with other evidence on Britain's relative decline. However, those latter findings and the methodology used to derive them have been criticised byBraun and his colleagues at ISSRU, and byLeydesdorff andKealey. This paper begins by examining these criticisms to establish whether there are any grounds for revising the previous conclusion that British science has been slipping in relation to other countries. It then analyses the latest publication and citation statistics. It also presents new data on highly cited papers and on the national distribution of Nobel Prizes. The paper concludes that, although a few isolated indicators might be taken to suggest that British science has been growing in some absolute sense, the great weight of evidence points to a continuing relative decline.
Article
Full-text available
New and more methodologically advanced publication and citation data for the period up to 1984 indicate that the relative decline of British science is continuing, albeit at a slower rate than in the 1970s.
Article
Internal migration in Italy has been characterised by deep changes in its composition, because of the growing share of high-skilled migrants (the emigration of which contributes to widening the internal brain drain) and the decreasing proportion of low-skilled migrants. Furthermore, recent interest in the literature in the role played by noneconomic elements in affecting migration decisions has highlighted the importance of a nonpecuniary factor, namely social capital (SC). For these reasons, this paper empirically investigates the role played by SC in interprovincial selective migration, considering migrants according to two education levels using data on 103 Italian provinces (2004–2012). The main findings reveal that provincial SC mainly contributes to reducing the migration flows of low-skilled individuals, albeit while also deterring the emigration of high-skilled individuals. Control variables confirm that better income conditions represent an important determinant of high-skilled migrants most likely because they seek to earn more, while better socioeconomic conditions such as labour market efficiency mostly influence those with a lower level of education.
Book
Policy makers, academic administrators, scholars, and members of the public are clamoring for indicators of the value and reach of research. The question of how to quantify the impact and importance of research and scholarly output, from the publication of books and journal articles to the indexing of citations and tweets, is a critical one in predicting innovation, and in deciding what sorts of research is supported and whom is hired to carry it out. There is a wide set of data and tools available for measuring research, but they are often used in crude ways, and each have their own limitations and internal logics. Measuring Research: What Everyone Needs to Know® will provide, for the first time, an accessible account of the methods used to gather and analyze data on research output and impact. Following a brief history of scholarly communication and its measurement — from traditional peer review to crowdsourced review on the social web — the book will look at the classification of knowledge and academic disciplines, the differences between citations and references, the role of peer review, national research evaluation exercises, the tools used to measure research, the many different types of measurement indicators, and how to measure interdisciplinarity. The book also addresses emerging issues within scholarly communication, including whether or not measurement promotes a "publish or perish" culture, fraud in research, or "citation cartels." It will also look at the stakeholders behind these analytical tools, the adverse effects of these quantifications, and the future of research measurement.
Chapter
The policy debate around researchers’ geographic mobility has been moving away from a theorized zero-sum game in which countries can be winners (“brain gain”) or losers (“brain drain”), and toward the concept of “brain circulation,” which implies that researchers move in and out of countries and everyone benefits. Quantifying trends in researchers’ movements is key to understanding the drivers of the mobility of talent, as well as the implications of these patterns for the global system of science, and for the competitive advantages of individual countries. Existing studies have investigated bilateral flows of researchers. However, in order to understand migration systems, determining the extent to which researchers have worked in more than two countries is essential. This study focuses on the subgroup of highly mobile researchers whom we refer to as “peripatetic researchers” or “super-movers.”
Article
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. 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.
Article
The age of researchers is a critical factor necessary to study the bibliometric characteristics of the scholars that produce new knowledge. In bibliometric studies, the age of scientific authors is generally missing; however, the year of the first publication is frequently considered as a proxy of the age of researchers. In this article, we investigate what are the most important bibibliometric factors that can be used to predict the age of researchers (birth and PhD age). Using a dataset of 3574 researchers from Québec for whom their Web of Science publications, year of birth and year of their PhD are known, our analysis falls under the linear regression setting and focuses on investigating the predictive power of various regression models rather than data fitting, considering also a breakdown by fields. The year of first publication proves to be the best linear predictor for the age of researchers. When using simple linear regression models, predicting birth and PhD years result in an error of about 3.7 years and 3.9 years, respectively. Including other bibliometric data marginally improves the predictive power of the regression models. A validation analysis for the field breakdown shows that the average length of the prediction intervals vary from 2.5 years for Basic Medical Sciences (for birth years) up to almost 10 years for Education (for PhD years). The average models perform significantly better than the models using individual observations. Nonetheless, the high variability of data and the uncertainty inherited by the models advice to caution when using linear regression models for predicting the age of researchers.
Article
Analysis of a vast set of public CVs reveals the world's most migratory scientists
Article
Combining unique, annual, bilateral data on labor flows of highly skilled immigrants for 10 OECD destinations between 2000 and 2012, with new databases comprising both unilateral and bilateral policy instruments, we present the first judicious cross-country assessment of policies aimed to attract and select high-skilled workers. Points-based systems are much more effective in attracting and selecting high-skilled migrants than requiring a job offer, labor market tests, and shortage lists. Offers of permanent residency, while attracting the highly skilled, overall reduce the human capital content of labor flows because they prove more attractive to non-high-skilled workers. Bilateral recognition of diploma and social security agreements foster greater flows of high-skilled workers and improve the skill selectivity of immigrant flows. Conversely, double taxation agreements deter high-skilled migrants, although they do not alter overall skill selectivity. Our results are robust to a variety of empirical specifications that account for destination-specific amenities, multilateral resistance to migration, and the endogeneity of immigration policies.
Article
The peer-effects literature highlights several distinct channels through which colleagues may affect individual and organizational performance. Building on this, we examine the relative contributions of different channels by decomposing the productivity effect of a star's arrival on (1) incumbents and (2) new recruits. Using longitudinal, university-level data, we report that hiring a star does not increase overall incumbent productivity, although this aggregate effect hides offsetting effects on related (positive) versus unrelated (negative) colleagues. However, the primary impact comes from an increase in the average quality of subsequent recruits, an effect that is most pronounced at non-highly-ranked institutions. We discuss the implications of our results for star-focused strategies to improve organizational performance.
Article
In recent years, there has been increased interest in methods for gender prediction based on first names that employ various open data sources. These methods have applications from bibliometric studies to customizing commercial offers for web users. Analysis of gender disparities in science based on such methods are published in the most prestigious journals, although they could be improved by choosing the most suited prediction method with optimal parameters and performing validation studies using the best data source for a given purpose. There is also a need to monitor and report how well a given prediction method works in comparison to others. In this paper, the author recommends a set of tools (including one dedicated to gender prediction, the R package called genderizeR), data sources (including the genderize.io API), and metrics that could be fully reproduced and tested in order to choose the optimal approach suitable for different gender analyses.
Article
As scientists’ careers unfold, mobility can allow researchers to find environments where they are more productive and more effectively contribute to the generation of new knowledge. In this paper, we examine the determinants of mobility of elite academics within the life sciences, including individual productivity measures and for the first time, measures of the peer environment and family factors. Using a unique data set compiled from the career histories of 10,051 elite life scientists in the U.S., we paint a nuanced picture of mobility. Prolific scientists are more likely to move, but this impulse is constrained by recent NIH funding. The quality of peer environments both near and far is an additional factor that influences mobility decisions. We also identify a significant role for family structure. Scientists appear to be unwilling to move when their children are between the ages of 14–17, and this appears to be more pronounced for mothers than fathers. These results suggest that elite scientists find it costly to disrupt the social networks of their children during adolescence and take these costs into account when making career decisions.
Article
On June 23, 2016, the UK narrowly voted to exit the European Union. Population issues-especially relating to the effect of population growth on infrastructure and public services and the need to " take back control" over immigration-played a central role in the campaigns (" Leave" and " Remain") leading up to the vote. I argue that the Leave campaign engaged in reckless scaremongering over the demographic effects of membership in the EU, while the Remain campaign was stifled by its commitment to a policy of fiscal austerity. The leader of the Labour Party, while putatively in the Remain camp, was strikingly circumspect in his support.
Article
This article analyses the impact of interorganizational mobility on academic performance. We develop a theoretical framework based on the job-matching approach adapted for researchers. The empirical analysis studies the careers of a sample of 171 UK academics, spanning 1957–2005. We find no evidence that mobility per se increases academic performance. Only mobility to “better” departments has a positive weakly significant impact, while downward mobility reduces researchers’ productivity. Job mobility is always associated with a short-term decrease in performance.
Article
In this study, the accuracy of the Author ID (author identification) in the Scopus bibliographic database was evaluated. For this purpose, we adopted the KAKEN database as the source of “correct data”. KAKEN is an open database and is the biggest funding database in Japan because it manages all the information of the largest public fund for academic researchers. In the KAKEN database, each researcher has a unique Researcher Number, which must be used when a proposal or annual report is submitted to the database. Thus, the concordance between each researcher and the associated Researcher Number is checked automatically and constantly. For this reason, we used this number to evaluate the Scopus Author ID. After matching bibliographic records between Scopus and KAKEN, we calculated recall and precision of the Scopus Author ID for Japanese researchers. We found that recall and precision were around 98 and 99 % respectively. This result showed the Author ID, though not perfectly accurate in terms of individual identification, was reliable enough to be used as a new tool for bibliometrics. We hope that academic researchers outside Japan will also evaluate the accuracy of the Scopus Author ID as a tool to uniquely identify individual researchers.
Article
This paper provides useful insights for the design of networks that promote research productivity. The results suggest that the different dimensions of social capital affect scientific performance differently depending on the area of knowledge. Overall, dense networks negatively affect the creation of new knowledge. In addition, the analysis shows that a division of labor in academia, in the sense of interdisciplinary research, increases the productivity of researchers. It is also found that the position in a network is critical. Researchers who are central tend to create more knowledge. Finally, the findings suggest that the number of ties have a positive impact on future productivity. Related to areas of knowledge, Exact Sciences is the area in which social capital has a stronger impact on research performance. On the other side, Social and Humanities, as well as Engineering, are the ones in which social capital has a lesser effect. The differences found across multiple domains of science suggest the need to consider this heterogeneity in policy design.
Article
This paper takes stock of recent research on patterns of cultural engagement in various European nations, with specific reference to British and Danish research. It argues that Bourdieu's original theorisation of cultural capital in ‘Distinction’ needs to be significantly updated to register the decline of ‘highbrow’ culture which these studies reveal. However, we argue that this shift does not entail the erosion of cultural capital itself, or the rise of the ‘cultural omnivore’, so much as the emergence of a form of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’. We argue that this emerging cultural capital can be associated with the partial creation of a European field and testifies to the continued stakes of cultural engagement today
Article
Historical accounts suggest that Jewish émigrés from Nazi Germany revolutionized US science. To analyze the émigrés' effects on chemical innovation in the United States, we compare changes in patenting by US inventors in research fields of émigrés with fields of other German chemists. Patenting by US inventors increased by 31 percent in émigré fields. Regressions which instrument for émigré fields with pre-1933 fields of dismissed German chemists confirm a substantial increase in US invention. Inventor-level data indicate that émigrés encouraged innovation by attracting new researchers to their fields, rather than by increasing the productivity of incumbent inventors.
Article
An exploration is presented of Scopus as a data source for the study of international scientific migration or mobility for five study countries: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, UK and USA. It is argued that Scopus author-affiliation linking and author profiling are valuable, crucial tools in the study of this phenomenon. It was found that the UK has the largest degree of outward international migration, followed by The Netherlands, and the USA the lowest. Language similarity between countries is a more important factor in international migration than it is in international co-authorship. During 1999–2010 the Netherlands showed a positive “migration balance” with the UK and a negative one with Germany, suggesting that in the Netherlands there were more Ph.D. students from Germany than there were from the UK, or that for Dutch post docs stage periods in the UK were more attractive than those in Germany. Comparison of bibliometric indicators with OECD statistics provided evidence that differences exist in the way the various study countries measured their number of researchers. The authors conclude that a bibliometric study of scientific migration using Scopus is feasible and provides significant outcomes. They make suggestions for further research.
Article
This paper explores the link between mobility and the presence of international research networks. Data come from the GlobSci survey of authors of articles published in 2009 in four fields of science working in sixteen countries. Summary evidence suggests that migration plays an important role in the formation of international networks. Approximately 40 percent of the foreign-born researchers report having kept research links with colleagues in their country of origin. Non-mobile researchers are less likely to collaborate with someone outside their country than are either the foreign born or returnees. When the non-mobile collaborate, their networks span fewer countries. Econometric results are consistent with the hypothesis that internationally mobile researchers contribute significantly to extending the international scope and quality of the research network in destination countries at no detriment to the quality of the research performed. Results also suggest that the “foreign premium” on collaboration propensity is driven in large part by mobile researchers who either trained or worked outside the destination country where they were surveyed in 2011. With but one exception, the mobility findings persist when we estimate models separately for the US, Europe, and other countries.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.
Article
The sociology of inequality has focused on the nation-state frame. The article argues that methodological nationalism is increasingly inadequate in a globalizing world. Migrant populations cannot be located in only one nation-state. Labour markets, cultural capital and reciprocal relations have become partly transnational. Both issues can be integrated into a theory of social inequality, if spatial relations are given adequate consideration. The opportunities of actors and the value of resources must be determined in relation to various national and transnational social spaces. Social positions in a world system cannot be characterized only by resource value. They are also structured by spatial autonomy and the quality of the spaces to which (migrant) populations have access. The argument is exemplified by a discussion of highly skilled migrants who possess cultural capital that is transnationally recognized. An analysis of their cultural capital shows how transnational and location-specific cultural capital interrelate.
Article
This paper starts with a discussion of definitions of social capital, then turns to issues in measurement, and finally, presents some evidence on the consequences of social capital. In the last five years, I have been working exclusively on some specific and perhaps unique problems about social capital in the United States, so all of my examples are going to be drawn from the United States experience. I don’t want to be interpreted as saying these trends are common to all OECD countries. It is just that the United States has been the main focus of my research for the past five years. There are, among those of us who work in the area, some marginal differences in terms of exactly how we would define social capital, but Michael Woolcock correctly says in his paper that among the people who are working in this field, there has been a visible convergence, definitionally, toward something like the definition he offers. The central idea of social capital, in my view, is that networks and the associated norms of reciprocity have value. They have value for the people who are in them, and they have, at least in some instances, demonstrable externalities, so that there are both public and private faces of social capital. I am focussing largely on the external returns, the public returns to social capital, but I think that is not at all inconsistent with the idea that there are also private returns. The same is no doubt true in the area of human capital, i.e. there are simultaneously public and private returns. In the great debate of the two Cambridges about "capital", the focus of much of the discussion was on whether physical capital was homogeneous enough to be susceptible to aggregate measurement. There is room for similar debates about human and social capital. Obviously there are many different forms of physical capital. For instance, both an egg-beater and an aircraft carrier enter into the American national accounts as little bits of physical capital, and yet they are not interchangeable. Try fixing your morning omelette with an aircraft carrier, or try attacking the Serbs with an eggbeater. The same thing is true about social capital. Social capital is certainly far from homogeneous.
Article
Policymakers across OECD countries have become increasingly concerned with the national and international debate about brain drain and have launched appraisal processes of the situations in their respective countries. The debates took different turns in different countries, but nevertheless, some common issues cut across a number of countries. The issues of academic structures and traditions, legislation and management, and reputation and image have surfaced as critical factors for brain drain and brain gain. In this paper I provide a systematic analysis of the international policy debates surrounding the issue of brain drain and brain gain and make an attempt to distinguish between them by classifying them into different categories.
Article
This paper analyzes the e¤ects of human capital (HC) and physical capital (PC) for the productivity of science departments. To address the endogeneity of input choices I use two extensive but temporary shocks to the HC and PC of science departments. As HC shock I use the dismissal of mostly Jewish scientists in Nazi Germany. As PC shock I use the destruction of facilities by Allied bombings during WWII. In the short run, a 10 percent to HC lowered departmental productivity by about 0.21sd. A 10 percent shock to PC lowered departmental productivity by about 0.05sd in the short run. While the HC shock persisted until the end of my sample period (1980), departments experiencing a PC shock recovered very quickly (by 1961). Additional results show that the dismissal ‘star scientists’was particularly detrimental, and that a fall in the quality of hires was an important mechanism for the persistence of the HC shock.
Article
By 2000, over one-third of Silicon Valley’s high-skilled workers were foreign-born, and overwhelmingly from Asia. These U.S.-educated engineers are transforming developmental opportunities for formerly peripheral regions as they build professional and business connections to their home countries. In a process more akin to “brain circulation” than “brain drain,” these engineers and entrepreneurs, aided by the lowered transaction costs associated with digitization, are transferring technical and institutional know-how between distant regional economies faster and more flexibly than most large corporations. This article examines how Chinese- and Indian-born engineers are accelerating the development of the information technology industries in their home countries—initially by tapping the low-cost skill in their home countries, and over time by contributing to highly localized processes of entrepreneurial experimentation and upgrading, while maintain close ties to the technology and markets in Silicon Valley. However, these successful models also raise several questions about the broader relevance of brain circulation outside of several key countries, and regions of those countries, within the global South.
Article
This witness seminar on the brain drain debate 1950-70s was held on 23 May 2006 in the JZ Young Lecture Theatre, University College London. It was organised by the Department of Science & Technology Studies, UCL, as part of a research project on the Brain Drain debate funded by the ESRC. The witnesses included Prof Ron Bullough (formerly Atomic Energy Research Establishment Harwell and interviewer for British recruitment boards in North America); Sir Alcon Copisarow (formerly Senior Civil Servant with interests in manpower issues); Prof Mike Hayns (recruited to Harwell from North America through British recruitment boards); Sir John Maddox (formerly Science Journalist, The Guardian and Editor, Nature)