Abstract
We study international mobility in academia, with a focus on the migration of published researchers to and from Russia. Using an exhaustive set of over 2.4 million Scopus publications, we analyze all researchers who have published with a Russian affiliation address in Scopus-indexed sources in 1996–2020. The migration of researchers is observed through the changes in their affiliation addresses, which altered their mode countries of affiliation across different years. While only 5.2% of these researchers were internationally mobile, they accounted for a substantial proportion of citations. Our estimates of net migration rates indicate that while Russia was a donor country in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it has experienced a relatively balanced circulation of researchers in more recent years. These findings suggest that the current trends in scholarly migration in Russia could be better framed as brain circulation, rather than as brain drain. Overall, researchers emigrating from Russia outnumbered and outperformed researchers immigrating to Russia. Our analysis on the subject categories of publication venues shows that in the past 25 years, Russia has, overall, suffered a net loss in most disciplines, and most notably in the five disciplines of neuroscience, decision sciences, mathematics, biochemistry, and pharmacology. We demonstrate the robustness of our main findings under random exclusion of data and changes in numeric parameters. Our substantive results shed light on new aspects of international mobility in academia, and on the impact of this mobility on a national science system, which have direct implications for policy development. Methodologically, our novel approach to handling big data can be adopted as a framework of analysis for studying scholarly migration in other countries.
Highlights
In an interconnected world, national science systems cannot be studied in a vacuum, while disregarding the impact of these systems on human mobility and migration
In the last part of the results section, we evaluate the overall impact of migration on each scientific discipline in Russia
Our goal was to understand the patterns of scholarly migration by tracking the international movements of researchers, and to determine the impact of such movements on the Russian science system, both overall and in each field of science
Summary
National science systems cannot be studied in a vacuum, while disregarding the impact of these systems on human mobility and migration. As states compete for talented people, international migration can both strengthen and weaken individual countries in terms of their total human capital, which can, in turn, affect the socioeconomic and innovative development of these countries. The large increase in high-skilled migration between countries in recent years poses new challenges for both researchers and policy-makers. Previous studies have suggested that Russia is both a donor country and a recipient country (Di Bartolomeo et al 2014; Podolskaya et al 2020) for migration among the general population. Scholars who have taken the characteristics of migrants into account have argued that Russia is more of a donor country (Kolesnikova et al 2014; Ushkalov and Malakha 2001; Zubova 2012); i.e., that it is a country on the losing side of the international exchange of highly skilled individuals
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