Arbeitsbereich
Migration und Mobilität
Auf einen Blick
Projekte
Publikationen
Team
Projekt
Scholarly Migration Database
Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Tom Theile, Maciej Danko, Asli Ebru Sanlitürk, Thiago Zordan Malaguth, Emilio Zagheni; in Zusammenarbeit mit László Németh (Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics, Berlin, Deutschland), Ridhi Kashyap (University of Oxford, Vereinigtes Königreich von Großbritannien und Nordirland), Francesco C. Billari (Bocconi University, Milan, Italien), Guy Stecklov (The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Kanada)
Ausführliche Beschreibung
The main goal of the Scholarly Migration Database (SMD) is to document patterns and trends in scientific mobility across time and space in order to enable research that advances migration theory. It offers counts and rates, disaggregated by gender and discipline, that are prepared in a consistent and systematic way, using state-of-the-art demographic and statistical methods. The database is developed by leveraging and repurposing proprietary and open-access bibliometric data from scientific publications to produce stock and flow data on internal and international scholarly migration events worldwide. Bibliometric data, which are metadata extracted from scientific publications, have proven to be essential for demographic research on the specific case of scholars as a subset of the high-skilled population. By repurposing these data and using academic affiliation addresses, the mobility trajectories of academics can be constructed. The SMD uses these data as a novel source of digital traces to systematically examine scholarly migration flows and stocks.
The metadata of publications come mainly from Elsevier’s Scopus, which is a proprietary and licensed database. Scopus data are provided to the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research by the German Competence Network for Bibliometrics through the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL). To complement our results based on Scopus data, we also leverage publicly available bibliometric databases such as OpenAlex and curriculum vitae from the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID). The geographic scope of the current database includes more than 200 countries and territories covered by Scopus and OpenAlex, and spans the 1998-2025 period.
The first version of the Scholarly Migration Database (SMD) was publicly launched in 2023. The second major update of the SMD, which includes gender- and discipline-disaggregated estimates of internal and international migration, was released in 2026. The SMD is an active and continuously evolving project with the goal of advancing research on the migration of scholars. It achieves its aims in part by making harmonized estimates and statistics obtained from bibliometric data more widely accessible. In addition, the SMD has developed into a growing community of dedicated scientists, students, and research support staff who are both contributors to and users of the database. According to citation data, the database is being used by a growing group of scholars worldwide.
Globale Netto-Migrationsraten

Internationale Nettomigrationsraten (NMR) weltweit auf der Grundlage von Scopus-Daten. Die Nettomigrationsraten von Wissenschaftlern weltweit aus den Jahren 2013-2017 auf der Grundlage von Scopus werden als Rate pro 1 000 aktive Wissenschaftler dargestellt. Rot gefärbte Länder weisen eine negative Nettorate auf, d. h. sie senden mehr Wissenschaftler ins Ausland als sie Wissenschaftler aufnehmen. © Akbaritabar, A., Theile, T. & Zagheni, E. Global flows and rates of international migration of scholars. WP-2023-018
Bildung und Wissenschaft, internationale Migration, ethnische Minderheiten, interne Migration, Wohnsituation, Urbanisierung, Migration, Statistik und Mathematik
Afrika, Amerika, Asien, Europa, Welt
Publikationen
Akbaritabar, A.; Theile, T.; Zagheni, E.:
MPIDR Working Paper WP-2026-029. (2026)

Akbaritabar, A.; Dańko, M. J.; Zhao, X.; Zagheni, E.:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 122:15, e2424521122–e2424521122. (2025)

Akbaritabar, A.; Theile, T.; Zagheni, E.:
Scientific Data 11:816, 1–14. (2024)

Akbaritabar, A.; Theile, T.; Zagheni, E.:
MPIDR Working Paper WP-2023-018. (2023)

Şanlitürk, A. E.; Zagheni, E.; Dańko, M. J.; Theile, T.; Akbaritabar, A.:
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 120:4, e2217937120–e2217937120. (2023)
