An investigation of the relationship between scientists’ mobility to/from China and their research performance

Continued collaboration shortens the transition period of scientists who move to another institution

Scientific collaboration plays a significant role in scientists' research performance. When scientists move from one institution to another and leave the team they belong to or lead, they may continue collaborating with the former team because engaging in or building a new team takes time. In this study, we collected data from the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) website on 2,922 scientists who published first-tier journal papers defined by the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) before they moved to a new institution. By applying a Poisson regression model to the dataset, we explored the correlation between continued collaboration and the transition period after scientists moved, which is defined as the time span between the year of the move and the year when they published their first top-tier journal paper after moving. Our findings indicated that: (1) continued collaboration significantly shortens the transition period by 27.2%; (2) continued collaboration significantly shortens the transition period of senior scientists to a larger extent than that of junior scientists; (3) continued collaboration significantly shortens the transition period of social scientists to a larger extent than that of natural scientists; (4) the transition period is shorter after moves for scientists with higher inherent potential; and (5) there is no evidence that the transition period is associated with culture-related differences between the origin country and the destination country after the move, or whether they had lived in the destination country before.

Does early publishing in top journals really predict long-term scientific success in the business field?

The soaring number of researchers has led to increasingly intense competition in academia. Early identification of scientists’ potential is a practical but difficult issue currently attracting escalating attention. This study takes the business field as an example and explores whether early publishing in top journals is an effective yardstick to recognise scientists who will have better academic performance in their careers. We extract the career records of publication and citations for 1933 business scientists with stable and continuous publication records from the combination of the ORCID and Scopus databases. Through regression analysis and various checks, we find that researchers publishing in top journals early in their careers indeed perform better subsequently compared to peers with similar early career profiles but no top journal publications. Our research sheds light on a new perspective for early identification of potential star scientists, especially in the business field, and justifies encouraging junior researchers to devote themselves to publishing in top-ranked peer-reviewed journals.

Beyond correlation: Towards matching strategy for causal inference in Information Science

Correlation has become a fundamental method for information science. However, correlations are limited in making concrete decisions. In this article, we detail how causal inference could be utilised in the field of information science. There are six main steps of implementing matching for causal inference, namely, selecting candidate control variables, determining control variables, calculating similarities among all samples, forming control group, examining the performance of control group and estimating causal effects. As an example, this article applies causal inference to investigate whether Nobel Physics award increases the after-award citations. The method is presented in a step-by-step manner so that researchers can reproduce our analysis in the future.

Recognizing New Trends in Brain Drain Studies in the Framework of Global Sustainability

Scholars had been documenting the Brain Drain phenomenon producing scientific literature for more than 50 years. After three decades of slow but steady progress, literature about this concept has accelerated its progress and growth path, in line with the 9th sustainable development goal “Build resilient infrastructure, promote sustainable industrialization and foster innovation” Thus, the present article aims to define the current theoretical trends about the analysis of advanced intellectual human capital’s international migratory phenomenon. This study uses a scientometric methodology on a corpus of 1212 articles indexed to the JCR-WoS from Social Sciences. The period covered in the study is from 1965 to 2020. The paper looks to understand how researchers studied the brain drain concept over the last 55 years in various disciplines. The report covers 99 categories from the Journal Citation Report (JCR) index. Results show that there is a scientific research critical mass that is studying the brain drain phenomenon. The analysis shows thematic trends at the sources, discourses, and consolidates classic works and some novel authors. Those new scholars and theoretical trends lead to refocused analysis beyond countries with a high development level. Such movement constitutes a new challenge in this line of research toward studying the effects of the brain drain in the peripheral areas of knowledge production.