December
07

Hybrid Format

Internal and International Migration of Scholars Worldwide: Trends, Patterns, and Inter-Relationships

Aliakbar Akbaritabar
Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography, December 07, 2022

Aliakbar Akbaritabar from the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography presented results that have implications for the global circulation of academic talent by showing the interrelation between internal and international migration, specifically for regions constantly losing their academic labour.

Abstract

The literature has often studied the migration of academics across countries worldwide. These studies have rarely focused on sub-national regions. We used data on 28+ million Scopus publications of 8+ million unique authors and geo-coded the affiliation addresses. Our results show that by focusing on the sub-national regions to complement the country level, the share of mobile scholars increases from 8% to 12.4%. We found that in all continents when a sub-national region is attractive for international migrants, it is also attractive for internal ones. The reverse is not true, though. This could indicate that for most continents, a depopulation is happening where scholars move abroad and their position is taken up by scholars arriving from other sub-national regions inside the country. In the US, as an example, states in the mid-eastern area have the highest count of scholars leaving for other destinations inside the US, mostly on the western side. In Germany, all four federations receiving scholars internally are sending scholars to international destinations. Our results have implications for the global circulation of academic talent by showing the interrelation between internal and international migration, specifically for regions constantly losing their academic labour.

About

Aliakbar Akbaritabar (Ali) is a computational social scientist with a background in sociology. He joined MPIDR from the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (DZHW) and German Competence Centre for Bibliometrics. Ali holds a PhD in economic sociology and labor studies from the University of Milan, and a PhD in sociology (social welfare) from the Allameh Tabataba'i University of Tehran. His work focuses on themes related (but not limited) to science of science, scholarly migration, social networks, collaboration networks, and computational social science. He uses computational tools and techniques to answer social scientific questions. He is @akbaritabar on Twitter.

Co-authors: Xinyi Zhao, Emilio Zagheni

The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock is one of the leading demographic research centers in the world. It's part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research society.