A Life Course Perspective on Migration of Scholars Worldwide

Migration has long been studied as a single event, yet recent scholarship calls for a life-course perspective that captures migration as a sequence of interconnected transitions. While full migration histories remain scarce, hampering our understanding of how people move over the life course, bibliometric data offer unprecedented micro-level insights into the migration trajectories of scholars, a subset of the high-skilled population. Although previous studies have leveraged these data to examine scholarly migration, they have focused mainly on international migration, with less attention to internal migration, and hardly any simultaneous attention to both types of migration within a single analytical framework. Moreover, prior work has largely operated at the macro level, with limited focus on the micro-level dynamics of how internal and international moves of scholars interact over time. To the best of our knowledge, none of these studies have used a life-course perspective to study the substitution and complementarity relationship between internal and international migration at the micro level. We use data from Elsevier’s 2020 Scopus snapshot, provided to us by the German Competence Network for Bibliometrics through the Max Planck Digital Library. We restrict the main analysis to the 2004 cohort, i.e., the sample of 499,287 authors who published their first paper in 2004. To analyze migration trajectories throughout the career life course, we created state-sequence data from academic birth (the year of the first publication) until the fifteenth year of the career, and implemented the sequence analysis using the TraMineR package in R. Due to the high number of unique trajectories, we employed the CLARA algorithm to identify clusters of migration trajectories empirically. Our preliminary results show that within the first 15 years of their careers, scholars typically experience either internal or international moves, with similar trajectory typologies emerging for both groups. However, internal migrants are more likely to experience a single migration in early career compared to international migrants, and international migrants are more likely to experience a return migration, suggesting distinct patterns of mobility. By accounting for multiple movements, academic age and gender, our results better identify some aspects of the inequalities in the migration of scholars that could otherwise be affected by a compositional effect. Next, we intend to analyze how scholars' individual characteristics and regions of origin are related to the probability of experiencing each typology of migration trajectories. We expect that scholars in some fields are more likely to move only internally or remain immobile, while scholars in other fields have an intrinsic mobile characteristic and are more likely to experience international moves or multiple migrations. Regarding gender, even after controlling for field of science and regional characteristics, we expect women to be more likely than men to be immobile or to make internal moves only. Regarding country and subnational region characteristics, we expect scholars who start their careers in countries with larger scientific communities to be more likely to experience only internal migration, since the country can hire and retain new cohorts of scholars.