Samin Aref’s research while affiliated with University of Toronto and other places

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Publications (7)


Homecoming After Brexit: Evidence on Academic Migration From Bibliometric Data
  • Article

December 2024

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8 Reads

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2 Citations

Demography

Ebru Sanlitürk

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Samin Aref

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Francesco C Billari

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.


Mapping academic migration of German-affiliated researchers across countries using 8 million Scopus publications from 1996 to 2020
  • Article
  • Full-text available

December 2021

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28 Reads

Abstracts of the ICA

Download

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

November 2019

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34 Reads

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18 Citations

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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.”


The demography of the peripatetic researcher: Evidence on highly mobile scholars from the Web of Science

July 2019

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83 Reads

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. More specifically, our aim is to track the international movements of researchers who have published in more than two countries through changes in the main affiliation addresses of researchers in over 62 million publications indexed in the Web of Science database over the 1956-2016 period. Using this approach, we have established a longitudinal dataset on the international movements of highly mobile researchers across all subject categories, and in all disciplines of scholarship. This article contributes to the literature by offering for the first time a snapshot of the key features of highly mobile researchers, including their patterns of migration and return migration by academic age, the relative frequency of their disciplines, and the relative frequency of their countries of origin and destination. Among other findings, the results point to the emergence of a global system that includes the USA and China as two large hubs, and England and Germany as two smaller hubs for highly mobile researchers.


Legislative effectiveness hangs in the balance: Studying balance and polarization through partitioning signed networks

June 2019

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23 Reads

Over the past several decades in the US Congress, there has been a decline in the fraction of bills introduced that eventually become law. This decline in legislative effectiveness has occurred in parallel with rising levels of political polarization, where coordination occurs primarily within not between groups, which are often defined by political party affiliation. However, in part due to challenges in measuring political polarization, the link between effectiveness and polarization is unclear. In this article, we have two goals. Methodologically, we propose a general method for identifying opposing coalitions in signed networks. Substantively, we use the partisanship of such coalitions in the US Congress since 1979 to examine the impact of polarization on rates of bill passage. Based on the legislative process used by the US Congress, it might be expected that a chamber's bills are more likely to become law when the controlling party holds a larger majority. However, we show that changes in bill passage rates are better explained by the partisanship of a chamber's largest coalition, which we identify by partitioning a signed network of legislators into two mutually opposing, but internally cohesive groups.


Signed Network Structural Analysis and Applications with a Focus on Balance Theory

January 2019

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50 Reads

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1 Citation

We analyse signed networks from the perspective of balance theory which predicts structural balance as a global structure for signed social networks that represent groups of friends and enemies. The scarcity of balanced networks encouraged us to define the notion of partial balance in order to quantify the extent to which a network is balanced. We evaluate several numerical measures of partial balance and recommend using the frustration index, a measure that satisfies key axiomatic properties and allows us to analyse graphs based on their levels of partial balance. The exact algorithms used in the literature to compute the frustration index, also called the line index of balance, are not scalable and cannot process graphs with a few hundred edges. We formulate computing the frustration index as a graph optimisation problem to find the minimum number of edges whose removal results in a balanced network given binary decision variables associated with graph nodes and edges. We use our first optimisation model to analyse graphs with up to 3000 edges. Reformulating the optimisation problem, we develop three more efficient binary linear programming models. Equipping the models with valid inequalities and prioritised branching as speed-up techniques allows us to process graphs with 15000 edges on inexpensive hardware. Besides making exact computations possible for large graphs, we show that our models outperform heuristics and approximation algorithms suggested in the literature by orders of magnitude. We extend the concepts of balance and frustration in signed networks to applications beyond the classic friend-enemy interpretation of balance theory in social context. Using a high-performance computer, we analyse graphs with up to 100000 edges to investigate a range of applications from biology and chemistry to finance, international relations, and physics.


Social Informatics 11th International Conference, SocInfo 2019, Doha, Qatar, November 18–21, 2019, Proceedings: 11th International Conference, SocInfo 2019, Doha, Qatar, November 18–21, 2019, Proceedings

January 2019

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37 Reads

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3 Citations

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Ingmar Weber

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Kareem M. Darwish

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[...]

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This volume constitutes the proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2019, held in Doha, Qatar, in November 2019. The 17 full and 5 short papers presented in these proceedings were carefully reviewed and selected from 86 submissions. The papers presented in this volume cover a broad range of topics, ranging from the study of socio-technical systems, to computer science methods to analyze complex social processes, as well as social concepts in the design of information systems.

Citations (2)


... This was specifically noticed by Smutny and Vehovar (2020), who found a sharp increase between 1999 and 2018 in the number of new entries related to SI with the exact search term SI appearing anywhere in the publication in all major bibliographic databases (see Table 1 in the research design section): Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Google Scholar (GScholar). In this context, the SocInfo conference, with its annual proceedings (e.g., Weber et al. 2019), is the most typical and visible example because it is one of the largest, albeit rare, formalized global activities under the umbrella of the SI label. Therefore, the SocInfo conference can be understood as a global SI endeavor that can link different approaches or schools (e.g., Petrič and Atanasova 2013). ...

Reference:

Evolution of social informatics: Publications, research, and educational activities
Social Informatics 11th International Conference, SocInfo 2019, Doha, Qatar, November 18–21, 2019, Proceedings: 11th International Conference, SocInfo 2019, Doha, Qatar, November 18–21, 2019, Proceedings
  • Citing Book
  • January 2019

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

... Bibliometric data have proven useful for demographic research 37,38 , especially for research on scholars as a subset of the high-skilled population -see our group's prior work as examples 7,8,[14][15][16][17][18][19] -. By re-purposing these data and using academic affiliation addresses, it is possible to construct the mobility trajectories of individual scholars [11][12][13][14][15] . ...

The Demography of the Peripatetic Researcher: Evidence on Highly Mobile Scholars from the Web of Science
  • Citing Chapter
  • November 2019

Lecture Notes in Computer Science