Laboratory

Migration and Mobility

Project

Scholarly Migration Database

Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Tom Theile, Maciej Danko, Asli Ebru Sanlitürk, Thiago Zordan Malaguth, Emilio Zagheni; in Collaboration with László Németh (Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics, Berlin, Germany), Ridhi Kashyap (University of Oxford, United Kingdom), Francesco C. Billari (Bocconi University, Milan, Italy), Guy Stecklov (The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada)

Detailed Description

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.

Global net migration rates

International net migration rates (NMR) worldwide based on Scopus data. Net-migration rates of scholars worldwide from 2013-2017 based on Scopus in terms of the rate per 1,000 active scholars are shown and highlights countries with red colours experience a negative net rate indicating sending a higher number of scholars abroad than the number of scholars they receive. © Akbaritabar, A., Theile, T. & Zagheni, E. Global flows and rates of international migration of scholars. WP-2023-018

Research Keywords:

Education and Science, Internal Migration, Housing, Urbanisation, International Migration, Ethnic Minorities, Migration, Statistics and Mathematics

Region keywords:

Africa, America, Asia, Europe, World

Links:

The Scholarly Migration database