International mobility and publication activity of early-career-researchers: What do statistics, bibliometrics and scientists themselves say?

Abstract

The article presents the results of a research project on the international mobility of the young Russian scientists. This study is focused on the impact of education or work experience abroad on their future scientific careers, namely their publication activity. The project attempts to consider academic mobility not from the traditional point of view of “brain drain”, but from the perspective of “brain circulation” which sees mobility as a mechanism for the transfer of knowledge and a valuable source of innovation as well as a necessary element of training and development of human resources in science. The participation of the young Russian researchers in international mobility was shown with the help of data from several nationally representative sociological surveys. The original feature of this project consists is combining two different methodological approaches: both objective and subjective assessments were brought together in order to evaluate the impact of international mobility on the future publication activity of young researchers. The case study of one large Russian university was examined: a unique database combining both biographical data (open information from CV and publication activity indicators (data from Scopus)) of employees of this university was collected. In addition, the in-depth interviews were conducted to complement the analysis. According to the study, the involvement of young Russian scientists in international academic mobility over the past years has been low in comparison with other countries participating in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). A positive relationship between the international mobility and scientific productivity of Russian scientists was revealed. As was shown, young researchers involved in international mobility not only publish more scientific article on average, but their papers are in fact published in higher ranking journals and are cited more often. Based on the materials of in-depth interviews, the specific mechanisms pushing a young researchers to upgrade their publication activity after or during their academic mobility were identified.