Arbeitsbereich

Migration und Mobilität

Auf einen Blick Projekte Publikationen Team

Projekt

Age, Gender, and Regional Differences in the Migration of Scholars (Dissertation)

Thiago Zordan Malaguth, Aliakbar Akbaritabar (MPIDR / University of Rostock, Institute of Sociology and Demography, Deutschland), Emilio Zagheni

Ausführliche Beschreibung

The migration of highly skilled individuals, including of scholars, who are a key segment of this population, is crucial to the dynamism of modern economies. It is an important phenomenon at both the micro and macro levels. At the micro level, scholars with migration experience have greater access to new methods and theories, job opportunities, and opportunities to expand their professional network. This experience can also have a positive effect on scholars’ productivity and impact. At the macro level, scholarly migration affects the size and composition of the scholarly population, and can lead to brain drain, gain, or circulation. While the repurposing of bibliometric data paved the way for a growing literature analyzing the migration of scholars, the question of how the migration experience varies over the career life course remains unanswered. Addressing this question is important because the academic age of scholars likely plays a critical role in their selection of research topics, collaboration style, migration decisions, career trajectories, and contributions to academia.

This project contributes to the existing literature by investigating the academic age and gender dynamics in the migration patterns of scholars at the macro and micro levels for both internal and international migration. In the first paper, we explore the gender aspect of scholarly migration. The literature on international scholarly migration has shown that women are less mobile and tend to move over shorter distances than men. However, studies about gender differences in internal migration of scientists are less common and have usually focused on specific countries. We fill this gap in the literature by simultaneously accounting for gender and regional differences in internal and international movements. We find that women are generally less mobile than men in terms of both international and internal migration, although the gender gap is smaller in the latter, and the pattern has been reversed in some countries in recent years. In the second study, we have added the age dimension to the analysis. We plan to adopt a life course perspective that allows us to consider multiple moves by the same author, when they occur, and to explore whether internal or international moves occur first. By accounting for multiple movements, academic age (i.e., time since first publication), and gender, our results can better identify inequalities by gender and academic age in the migration processes that could otherwise be affected by a compositional effect. In the third study, we focus on the methodological aspects of studying migration with bibliometric data. Based on previous literature and on the first two studies of this project, the goal of the third paper is to explore how migration rates are currently estimated using bibliometric data. Additionally, we intend to analyze how research decisions related to the identification of a migration event, the estimation of population exposure, and the treatment of gaps between publications and multiple affiliations can affect these estimates. We also provide general recommendations for research using bibliometric data to study the migration patterns of scholars.

We expect the project outcomes to advance our knowledge of the age, gender, and regional characteristics of scholarly migration, which is essential for designing effective policies and maintaining a vibrant academic system. Methodologically, we expect to provide recommendations that will enhance the quality and transparency of current applications using bibliometric data.