The many facets of academic mobility and its impact on scholars' career

TL;DR

This study examines how international mobility varies among scholars based on socio-demographic factors and its impact on scientific productivity and social capital, revealing gender and field disparities and a positive link between mobility and research outcomes.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of mobility patterns, their socio-demographic correlates, and their effects on scientific impact and social networks using bibliometric data.

Findings

Researchers from North America and Sub-Saharan Africa show distinct mobility tendencies.

Gender inequality exists in international mobility across fields and countries.

Mobility correlates positively with scientific output and social capital.

Abstract

International mobility in academia can enhance the human and social capital of researchers and consequently their scientific outcome. However, there is still a very limited understanding of the different mobility patterns among scholars with various socio-demographic characteristics. The aim of this study is twofold. First, we investigate to what extent individual factors associate with the mobility of researchers. Second, we explore the relationship between mobility and scientific activity and impact. For this purpose, we used a bibliometric approach to track the mobility of authors. To compare the scientific outcomes of researchers, we considered the number of publications and received citations as indicators, as well as the number of unique co-authors in all their publications. We also analysed the co-authorship network of researchers and compared centrality measures of mobile and non-mobile researchers. Results show that researchers from North America and Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly female ones, have the lowest, respectively, highest tendency towards international mobility. Having international co-authors increases the probability of international movement. Our findings uncover gender inequality in international mobility across scientific fields and countries. Across genders, researchers in the Physical sciences have the most and in the Social sciences the least rate of mobility. We observed more mobility for Social scientists at the advanced career stage, while researchers in other fields prefer to move at earlier career stages. Also, we found a positive correlation between mobility and scientific outcomes, but no apparent difference between females and males. Comparing the centrality of mobile and non-mobile researchers in the co-authorship networks reveals a higher social capital advantage for mobile researchers.