Migration and Collaboration of Scholars Worldwide: A Word Embedding Representation

Erin Walk , Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR)

Migration of academics is a core focus of the recent literature. Factors affecting academics’ decision to migrate, such as scholarly collaboration, are understudied and those studies which do consider scholarly migration and collaboration in tandem report paradoxical findings. We take a two pronged approach, considering both how spatial representations of mobility and collaboration networks compare and how collaboration patterns of mobile authors relate to their movement between institutions. To do so, we selected a random sample of authors worldwide from Scopus 2020 data based on number of publications, corresponding authorship, publication in top-ranked journals, and mobility status to construct control/observation groups. We find that collaboration and mobility trajectories are highly similar across groups, though embedding representations of collaboration are more densely packed than those for mobility. Authors who are mobile or talents (top 1% based on our selection criteria) are more likely to have a high number of collaborators. Furthermore, though few authors collaborate only before or after a movement event, collaboration increases leading up to an affiliation change and the majority of publications with a target institution are published prior to the initial move there. Our methodological framework opens up promising avenues for future research on individual level forecasting of scholarly migration and on global dynamics of academic talent circulation.

See paper

 Presented in Session P3. Migration, Economics, Policies, History