February 12, 2026 | News | Overview

Recommended Reading

Here is an overview of the latest reading recommendations for papers published by scientists at the MPIDR.

How Mobile are Highly Talented Academics Compared to Other Scientists?

Paper published: November 4, 2025

Diagram shows mobility status of female, male, and unknown researchers, divided into talents and others, with categories Non-mobile, International, Internal, and Both.

In a recent study, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), the University of Rostock, the Science Policy and Strategy Department of the administrative Headquarters of the Max Planck Society and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research examined whether regional and gender-specific differences exist in the academic mobility of highly talented scientists compared to other scientists.

Scopus bibliometric data was used to identify potentially talented academics and the comparison group. This enabled the researchers to track developments in mobility and immobility. The research team employed three different gender and geographical region classifications. Both groups were compared using multinomial probit regression models.

The results show that potentially talented researchers have a higher propensity for mobility. This applies to male researchers to a greater extent than to female researchers. Women were overrepresented among the non-mobile authors in the comparison group. Higher mobility is a privilege, as certain scientists have better access to it.

Originalpublikation

Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Robin Haunschild, Lutz Bornmann: A study of gender and regional differences in scientific mobility and immobility among researchers identified as potentially talented in Journal of Informetrics (2025), DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2025.101744

Keywords

Talented academics, Bibliometric indicators, Scientific mobility and immobility, Gendered mobility

Married Female Couples at Highest Risk of Divorce

Paper published: September 9, 2025

Diagram shows predicted divorce probabilities for female couples, male couples and opposite-sex couples across five models.

In a study published in 2025, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), the University of Helsinki and Tilburg University found that female couples have a 2.2 times higher risk of divorce than different-sex couples, and a 1.6 times higher risk than male couples.

The scientists investigated whether differences in the duration of premarital cohabitation, having children from previous relationships and having children within the partnership could explain the increased risk of divorce observed among female couples compared to male couples and couples of the different sexes. They evaluated registry data from same-sex and different-sex couples who had entered into a registered partnership or marriage in Finland between 2003 and 2020.

Female couples were 2.1 times more likely to divorce than different-sex couples, and 1.2 times more likely to divorce than male couples when researchers took the duration of premarital cohabitation, having children from previous relationships and having children within the partnership into account. Living together before marriage is associated with an increased risk of divorce for same-sex couples, but not for different-sex couples. The risk of divorce increases when children are brought into the marriage, while it decreases slightly for couples with children together. However, this applies far more to different-sex couples than it does to same-sex couples.

Past and current relationship experiences play a crucial role in understanding instability in same-sex and different-sex partnerships.

Original Publication

Maria Ponkilainen, Elina Einiö, Mine Kühn, Mikko Myrskylä: Same-Sex and Different-Sex Couples' Divorce Risks: The Role of Cohabitation and Childbearing, in Journal of Marriage and Family; DOI: 10.1111/jomf.70027

Keywords

Children, cohabitation, divorce, family dynamics, LGBTQ, same-sex marriage

Rethinking Formal Demography: Birth as an Event Experienced by the Child

Paper published October 3, 2025

In a recent methodological paper, Annette Baudisch (University of Southern Denmark) and Antonino Polizzi (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research) use methods from mortality research to describe when children are born in the parental life course.

The authors build on the “Born once, die once” approach (B1D1), which views birth as an event experienced by the child, not the parent. From the child’s perspective, birth is a certain event that occurs only once, just like death. The B1D1 perspective uses birth counts by parental cohort and age to calculate density, survival, and hazard functions that describe reproductive timing at the population level. In their new article, Annette Baudisch and Antonino Polizzi reformulate the B1D1 approach, so that density, survival, and hazard functions can be calculated using fertility rates as input. This is important because fertility rates are more frequently used in the study of reproductive timing (“conventional approach”).

The new density, survival, and hazard functions for the conventional approach summarize fertility age patterns without requiring data on individual birth histories or parity. All that is needed are age-specific fertility rates from sources such as the Human Fertility Database or the UN World Population Prospects. “We hope that the functions could be useful to advance conventional fertility research, for example by studying age patterns of fertility in different population groups. Potentially, the functions could also be helpful to improve fertility forecasts,” Antonino Polizzi says.

Original Publication

Annette Baudisch, Antonino Polizzi: Fertility, birth, reproduction: Connecting formal demographic frameworks in Population Studies; DOI: 10.1080/00324728.2025.2550770

Keywords

childbirth, total fertility rate, mean age at birth, quantum, tempo, formal demography, survival analysis, event history analysis, hazard