Studying the brain drain: Can bibliometric methods help?

Grit Laudel ()
Additional contact information
Grit Laudel: Research Evaluation and Policy Project, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University

Scientometrics, 2003, vol. 57, issue 2, No 6, 215-237

Abstract: Abstract Today science policy makers in many countries worry about a brain drain, i.e., about permanently losing their best scientists to other countries. However, such a brain drain has proven to be difficult to measure. This article reports a test of bibliometric methods that could possibly be used to study the brain drain on the micro-level. An investigation of elite mobility must solve the three methodological problems of delineating a specialty, identifying a specialty's elite and identifying international mobility and migration. The first two problems were preliminarily solved by combining participant lists from elite conferences (Gordon conferences) and citation data. Mobility was measured by using the address information of publication databases. The delineation of specialties has been identified as the crucial problem in studying elite mobility on the micro- level. Policy concerns of a brain drain were confirmed by measuring the mobility of the biomedical Angiotensin specialty.

Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (63)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1023/A:1024137718393 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:57:y:2003:i:2:d:10.1023_a:1024137718393

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1023/A:1024137718393

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().