Online Invited Seminar Talk

Measuring the Mobility of Researchers Using Data on Scholarly Publications

Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography
Online Invited Seminar Talk, October 14, 2020

Vincent Larivière from the Université de Montréal gave an Online Invited Seminar Talk on how metadata found on scholarly publications can be used to measure the mobility of researchers at a large scale.

Abstract

Researchers are amongst the most mobile of all social groups, and understanding their mobility patterns is an important science policy question. However, the measurement of researchers’ mobility has historically relied on survey data, which leads to issues of scale and consistency. The first part of this talk will describe how metadata found on scholarly publications can be used to measure the mobility of researchers at a large scale. Then, using disambiguated publication records from millions of researchers, it will present the results of an analysis of global mobility patterns across countries and regions, and discuss how those relate with gender and discipline. The talk will conclude with a discussion on the policy implications the findings, as well as the limitations of this bibliometric approach for the measurement of mobility.

About

Vincent Larivière holds the Canada Research Chair on the Transformations of Scholarly Communication at the Université de Montréal, where he is professor of information science and associate vice-president (planning and communications). He is also scientific director of the Érudit platform, which is home to more than 170 journals in the social sciences and humanities, and associate scientific director of the Observatoire des sciences et des technologies (OST).