Contribution of Migrant Researchers to Scientific Production and Impact

Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)
Andres F. Castro Torres, Centre for Demographic Studies
Emilio Zagheni, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)

International migration of scholars plays a key role in scientific communication and collaboration. Scholars' migration can bring positive and negative consequences for scientific research. It improves research productivity and impact and facilitates the exchange and dissemination of research outputs. Migration can also be disadvantageous to sending regions if a significant fraction of scholars emigrates. Yet, systems of evaluation in science rarely consider international mobility. Some funding schemes have citizenship or nationality among their eligibility criteria excluding migrant scholars. The outputs of migrant scholars are not part of the evaluation. We use Scopus data on 8.2 million scholars to measure the size of the global migrant population in comparison to their contribution to scientific production and impact across disciplines and genders. In most countries consistently the migrant scholars are contributing more to publications and impact than their share of the population. While the share of women among migrant scholars is substantially lower, still, their higher contribution to production and impact is evident. Smaller countries show a more distinct pattern which highlights the need to focus on untold stories of smaller science systems that are distinct from the large science producers in the focus of the majority of studies.

Keywords: International Migration, Migrant Populations and Refugees, Big data, Data and Methods

See paper.