Abstract
Academic migration is the change of host institution by a researcher, typically aimed at achieving a stronger research profile. Scientific features such as the number of collaborations, the productivity and its research impact tend to be directly affected by such movements. In this paper we analyse the dynamics of the collaboration network of researchers as they move from an institution to the next one. We specifically highlight cases where they increase and when they shrink, and quantify the dependency between the collaboration networks before and after such a movement. Finally, we drill down the analysis by dividing movements depending on the career stage of the researchers. The analysis shows a remarkable dynamism of collaboration network across migrations. Interestingly, not always movements result in larger collaboration networks, while the overall similarity between networks across movements is quite limited on average. Qualitatively, the same effects can be found at all career stages, while clearly the magnitude of them might vary. These results are based on a dataset extracted from Scopus, containing detailed scientific information for the publications of 84,141 researchers.
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Notes
- 1.
The APIs used are the following: Author Search API, the Author Retrieval API, and the Affiliation Retrieval API.
- 2.
We are well aware that changes of affiliations as proxies for academic movements suffer from several limitations (e.g., authors with multiple affiliations could create spurious short detected movements). However, at the moment, it is the only approximation that allows researchers to study scientists’ mobility at a large scale. We have in place some preprocessing aimed at mitigating the impact of such limitations (such as the removal of short movements, discussed later on).
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially funded by the SoBigData++, HumaneAI-Net, MARVEL, and OK-INSAID projects. The SoBigData++ project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871042. The HumaneAI-Net project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 952026. The MARVEL project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 957337. The OK-INSAID project has received funding from the Italian PON-MISE program under grant agreement ARS01 00917.
The work of Pavlos Paraskevopoulos was supported by the ERCIM Alain Bensoussan Fellowship Program.
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Paraskevopoulos, P., Boldrini, C., Passarella, A., Conti, M. (2020). Dynamics of Scientific Collaboration Networks Due to Academic Migrations. In: Aref, S., et al. Social Informatics. SocInfo 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12467. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60975-7_21
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