Brain Drain and Brain Gain in Russia: Analyzing International Migration of Researchers by Discipline using Scopus Bibliometric Data 1996-2020
Alexander Subbotin, Samin Aref
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26 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, peer-reviewed and accepted author-copy. Publisher's verified version: Subbotin, A. and Aref, S. (2021) Brain Drain and Brain Gain in Russia: Analyzing International Migration of Researchers by Discipline using Scopus Bibliometric Data 1996-2020. Forthcoming in Scientometrics
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.
For more than 40 years, the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now part of Thomson Reuters) produced the only available bibliographic databases from which bibliometricians could compile large-scale bibliometric indicators. ISI's citation indexes, now regrouped under the Web of Science (WoS), were the major sources of bibliometric data until 2004, when Scopus was launched by the publisher Reed Elsevier. For those who perform bibliometric analyses and comparisons of countries or institutions, the existence of these two major databases raises the important question of the comparability an…
The migration of scholars is a major driver of innovation and of diffusion of knowledge. Although large-scale bibliometric data have been used to measure international migration of scholars, our understanding of internal migration among researchers is very limited. This is partly due to a lack of data aggregated at a suitable sub-national level. In this study, we analyze internal migration in Mexico based on over 1.1 million authorship records from the Scopus database. We trace the movements of scholars between Mexican states, and provide key demographic measures of internal migration for the …
Bibliometric methods are used in multiple fields for a variety of purposes, namely for research evaluation. Most bibliometric analyses have in common their data sources: Thomson Reuters' Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus. This research compares the journal coverage of both databases in terms of fields, countries and languages, using Ulrich's extensive periodical directory as a base for comparison. Results indicate that the use of either WoS or Scopus for research evaluation may introduces biases that favor Natural Sciences and Engineering as well as Biomedical Research to the detrimen…
Scientific collaborations are among the main enablers of development in small national science systems. Although analysing scientific collaborations is a well-established subject in scientometrics, evaluations of scientific collaborations within a country remain speculative with studies based on a limited number of fields or using data too inadequate to be representative of collaborations at a national level. This study represents a unique view on the collaborative aspect of scientific activities in New Zealand. We perform a quantitative study based on all Scopus publications in all subjects f…
Introduction: This study analyzes the scientific production in business administration in scientific articles based on modeling partial least squares structural equations (Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling PLS-SEM) in the 2011-2020 period. Methodology: The study is exploratory - descriptive and has three phases: a) Selection of keywords and search criteria; (b) Search and refinement of information; c) information analysis. A method of bibliometric review of the specific literature has been used based on the analysis of predefined indicators and completed with a qualitative con…
Symbiosis Institute of Technology (SIT), Symbiosis International (Deemed University)（共生国际（被视为大学）共生技术学院（SIT））
Cohort Intelligence or CI is one of its kind of novel optimization algorithm. Since its inception, in a very short span it is applied successfully in various domains and its results are observed to be effectual in contrast to algorithm of its kind. Till date, there is no such type of bibliometric analysis carried out on CI and its related applications. So, this research paper in a way will be an ice breaker for those who want to take up CI to a new level. In this research papers, CI publications available in Scopus are analyzed through graphs, networked diagrams about authors, source titles, k…
Academic institutions, federal agencies, publishers, editors, authors, and librarians increasingly rely on citation analysis for making hiring, promotion, tenure, funding, and/or reviewer and journal evaluation and selection decisions. The Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) citation databases have been used for decades as a starting point and often as the only tools for locating citations and/or conducting citation analyses. ISI databases (or Web of Science), however, may no longer be adequate as the only or even the main sources of citations because new databases and tools that allo…
Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research（马克斯·普朗克人口研究所）；Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford（牛津大学社会学院莱弗休姆人口研究中心）；Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto（多伦多大学机械与工业工程系）；Department of Sociology, University of British Columbia（英属哥伦比亚大学社会学系）
The international migration of researchers is an important dimension of scientific mobility, and has been the subject of considerable policy debate. However, tracking the migration life courses of researchers is challenging due to data limitations. In this study, we use Scopus bibliometric data on eight million publications from 1.1 million researchers who have published at least once with an affiliation address from Germany in 1996-2020. We construct the partial life histories of published researchers in this period and explore both their out-migration and the subsequent return of a subset of…
The Semantic Web is one of the main efforts aiming to enhance human and machine interaction by representing data in an understandable way for machines to mediate data and services. It is a fast-moving and multidisciplinary field. This study conducts a thorough bibliometric analysis of the field by collecting data from Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus for the period of 1960-2009. It utilizes a total of 44,157 papers with 651,673 citations from Scopus, and 22,951 papers with 571,911 citations from WOS. Based on these papers and citations, it evaluates the research performance of the Semantic Web …
Although bibliometric studies for the assessment of scientific output at university-level are relatively common, data for performance at department-level rarely exist. In this paper we develop a methodology and tools for conducting department-level assessments, and conduct for the first time a complete bibliometric study of scientific output of all university departments in Greece. The study is based on data from Scopus about the number of scientific publications and respective citations of all faculty members in each department for the period 2017-2021. Code scripts were developed using R to …
Analysis of the Publication and Document Types in OpenAlex, Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed and Semantic Scholar
Göttingen State and University Library, University of Göttingen（哥廷根州立大学图书馆，哥廷根大学）；GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences（GESIS-莱布尼茨社会科学研究所）；German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies, DZHW（德国高等教育研究与科学研究中心，DZHW）
本研究分析了OpenAlex、Web of Science、Scopus、PubMed和Semantic Scholar中文档和出版物类型的分类差异，揭示了不同数据库在分类策略和数据整理上的显著差异。
This paper measures social media activity of 15 broad scientific disciplines indexed in Scopus database using Altmetric.com data. First, the presence of Altmetric.com data in Scopus database is investigated, overall and across disciplines. Second, the correlation between the bibliometric and altmetric indices is examined using Spearman correlation. Third, a zero-truncated negative binomial model is used to determine the association of various factors with increasing or decreasing citations. Lastly, the effectiveness of altmetric indices to identify publications with high citation impact is com…
Identifying and monitoring Open Access (OA) publications might seem a trivial task while practical efforts prove otherwise. Contradictory information arise often depending on metadata employed. We strive to assign OA status to publications in Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus while complementing it with different sources of OA information to resolve contradicting cases. We linked publications from WOS and Scopus via DOIs and ISSNs to Unpaywall, Crossref, DOAJ and ROAD. Only about 50% of articles and reviews from WOS and Scopus could be matched via a DOI to Unpaywall. Matching with Crossref broug…
Nationally oriented scientific-scholarly journals are considered from a methodological-informetric viewpoint, analysing data extracted from Scimago Journal Rank based on Scopus. An operational definition is proposed of a journal's degree of national orientation based on the geographical distribution of its publishing or citing authors, and the role of international collaboration and a country's total publication output. A comprehensive analysis is presented of trends up until 2019 in national orientation and citation impact of national journals entering Scopus, extending outcomes in earlier st…
E-learning has been continuously present in current educational discourse, thanks to technological advances, learning methodologies and public or organizational policies, among other factors. However, despite its boom and dominance in various subject areas, this thematic does not yet exist in the world system of publications. Therefore, works in this thematic end up being published under related categories, particularly Education or categories within subject area Computer Science, thus fragmenting and make invisible the existing knowledge. This work is based on the hypothesis that the scientif…
In Ukraine, Scopus data are used to evaluate academics. Existing shortcomings in the Ukrainian evaluation system allow them to publish in titles that have been delisted from Scopus, and continue to use those papers as credible research output for evaluation. The purpose of this study was to analyse the publishing activity of Ukrainian institutions in Scopus-delisted titles (as of September 2021) in different fields between 2011 and 2020 and to attempt to appreciate how common this practice is among Ukrainian authors. Scopus was sourced to collect bibliographic and citations-related data, while…
In this study, we use research publication data from the field of social science to identify collaboration networks among social science research communities of India and Pakistan. We have used Scopus database to extract information of social science journals for both countries India and Pakistan. Study of this data is significant as both countries have common social issues and many of common social values. Keywords analysis has been done to see common research areas in both communities like poverty, education, the issue of gender etc. Despite having many of the common social issues, collabora…
A bibliometric approach is explored to tracking international scientific migration, based on an analysis of the affiliation countries of authors publishing in peer reviewed journals indexed in Scopus. The paper introduces a model that relates base concepts in the study of migration to bibliometric constructs, and discusses the potentialities and limitations of a bibliometric approach both with respect to data accuracy and interpretation. Synchronous and asynchronous analyses are presented for 10 rapidly growing countries and 7 scientifically established countries. Rough error rates of the prop…
This is the first detailed study on the coverage of Microsoft Academic (MA). Based on the complete and verified publication list of a university, the coverage of MA was assessed and compared with two benchmark databases, Scopus and Web of Science (WoS), on the level of individual publications. Citation counts were analyzed, and issues related to data retrieval and data quality were examined. A Perl script was written to retrieve metadata from MA based on publication titles. The script is freely available on GitHub. We find that MA covers journal articles, working papers, and conference items t…
Bibliometrics such as the number of papers and times cited are often used to compare researchers based on specific criteria. The criteria, however, are different in each research domain and are set by empirical laws. Moreover, there are arguments, such that the simple sum of metric values works to the advantage of elders. Therefore, this paper attempts to constitute features from time series data of bibliometrics, and then classify the researchers according to the features. In detail, time series patterns are extracted from bibliographic data sets, and then a model to classify whether the rese…
Research managers benchmarking universities against international peers face the problem of affiliation disambiguation. Different databases have taken separate approaches to this problem and discrepancies exist between them. Bibliometric data sources typically conduct a disambiguation process that unifies variant institutional names and those of its sub-units so that researchers can then search all records from that institution using a single unified name. This study examined affiliation discrepancies between Scopus, Web of Science, Dimensions, and Microsoft Academic for 18 Arab universities o…
Machine Learning (ML) has garnered considerable attention from researchers and practitioners as a new and adaptable tool for disease diagnosis. With the advancement of ML and the proliferation of papers and research in this field, a complete examination of Machine Learning-Based Disease Diagnosis (MLBDD) is required. From a bibliometrics standpoint, this article comprehensively studies MLBDD papers from 2012 to 2021. Consequently, with particular keywords, 1710 papers with associate information have been extracted from the Scopus and Web of Science (WOS) database and integrated into the excel …
The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China, and South Africa) are noted for their increasing participation in science and technology. The governments of these countries have been boosting their investments in research and development to become part of the group of nations doing research at a world-class level. This study investigates the development of the BRICS countries in the domain of top-cited papers (top 10% and 1% most frequently cited papers) between 1990 and 2010. To assess the extent to which these countries have become important players on the top level, we compare the BR…
We explore if and how Microsoft Academic (MA) could be used for bibliometric analyses. First, we examine the Academic Knowledge API (AK API), an interface to access MA data, and compare it to Google Scholar (GS). Second, we perform a comparative citation analysis of researchers by normalizing data from MA and Scopus. We find that MA offers structured and rich metadata, which facilitates data retrieval, handling and processing. In addition, the AK API allows retrieving frequency distributions of citations. We consider these features to be a major advantage of MA over GS. However, we identify fo…
To analyse the outcomes of the funding they provide, it is essential for funding agencies to be able to trace the publications resulting from their funding. We study the open availability of funding data in Crossref, focusing on funding data for publications that report research related to Covid-19. We also present a comparison with the funding data available in two proprietary bibliometric databases: Scopus and Web of Science. Our analysis reveals a limited coverage of funding data in Crossref. It also shows problems related to the quality of funding data, especially in Scopus. We offer recom…
Scientific contribution and research performance of a university, research group, or institute needs to be evaluated all the more with the increasing volume and fast-developing disciplines of research. The need of the time is to develop tools for strategic planning and management that will help research bodies to rank and benchmark themselves against international standards. This will enable them to invest appropriately in research areas of promising strength and gain maximally from them, thus fulfilling the ultimate purpose of positive impact of research on society. Our tool is capable of rat…
The paper presents the results of the study of international and national cooperation of Ukrainian scientists from different scientific fields using citation analysis data from Scopus in the period of 2011-2015. The results show that during the period under study, the number of documents of highly cited Ukrainian scientists that have received enough citations to be included to the top 1%, 5% and 10% most cited documents in the world, evidenced an increase and were significantly different in different subjects areas. Papers written by a group of co-authors predominate among highly cited documen…
In this research, we examine the hypothesis that gender disparities in international research collaboration differ by collaboration intensity, academic position, age, and academic discipline. The following are the major findings: (1) while female scientists exhibit a higher rate of general, national, and institutional collaboration, male scientists exhibit a higher rate of international collaboration, a finding critically important in explaining gender disparities in impact, productivity, and access to large grants. (2) An aggregated picture of gender disparities hides a more nuanced cross-dis…
In this study we present an application which can be accessed via www.excellence-networks.net and which represents networks of scientific institutions worldwide. The application is based on papers (articles, reviews and conference papers) published between 2007 and 2011. It uses (network) data, on which the SCImago Institutions Ranking is based (Scopus data from Elsevier). Using this data, institutional networks have been estimated with statistical models (Bayesian multilevel logistic regression, BMLR) for a number of Scopus subject areas. Within single subject areas, we have investigated and …
Did the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 influence the scientific performance of the researchers in Eastern European countries? Did this historical event affect international collaboration by researchers from the Eastern European countries with those of Western countries? Did it also change international collaboration among researchers from the Eastern European countries? Trying to answer these questions, this study aims to shed light on international collaboration by researchers from the Eastern European countries (Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Po…
The enlarged coverage of the international publication and citation databases Web of Science and Scopus towards local media in social sciences was a welcome response to an increased usage of these databases in evaluation and funding systems. The mostly international journals available earlier were the basis for the development of current standard bibliometric indicators. The same indicators may no longer measure exactly the same concepts when applied to newly introduced or extended media categories, with possibly different characteristics than those of international journals. This paper invest…
Prediction of the future performance of academic journals is a task that can benefit a variety of stakeholders including editorial staff, publishers, indexing services, researchers, university administrators and granting agencies. Using historical data on journal performance, this can be framed as a machine learning regression problem. In this work, we study two such regression tasks: 1) prediction of the number of citations a journal will receive during the next calendar year, and 2) prediction of the Elsevier CiteScore a journal will be assigned for the next calendar year. To address these t…
