Preprint

Resolving the paradox between migration and collaboration of scholars worldwide

Walk, E., Akbaritabar, A.

SocArXiv papers
15 pages.
SocArXiv
submitted: 22 August 2024 / last edited: 23 August 2024 (2024), unpublished

DOI:10.31235/osf.io/g2u6v

Open Access

Reproducible

Abstract

Scholars substantially contribute to innovation in knowledge economies. Identifying where scholars come from and move to is a core focus of the recent literature. However, whether collaboration networks of scholars affect where they move next is understudied. Studies which do consider scholarly migration and collaboration in tandem report paradoxical findings. We take a two pronged approach, considering both how spatial representations of mobility and collaboration networks compare and how collaboration patterns of mobile authors relate to their movement between institutions. We selected a random sample of authors worldwide from Scopus 2020 data based on number of publications, corresponding authorship, publication in top-ranked journals, and mobility status to construct comparable control/observation groups. Our results enabled us to resolve the paradoxical effect between collaboration and mobility. We found that while the histories of these two variables are highly similar across groups, embedding representations of collaboration are more densely packed than those for mobility which could indicate higher costs of mobility than collaboration. Authors who are mobile or identified as top performers, top 1\% based on our selection criteria, are more likely to have a higher number of collaborators. Furthermore, though few authors collaborate only before or after a mobility event, collaboration increases leading up to a mobility event and the majority of publications with a target institution are published prior to the initial move there. Hence our rigorous investigation using multiple methodologies show that the aggregate direction of effect is from collaboration to mobility. Our methodological framework opens up promising avenues for future research on individual level forecasting of scholarly migration and on global dynamics of academic talent circulation.