Bilateral flows and rates of subnational and international migration of scholars worldwide by gender and field

Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Tom Theile and Emilio Zagheni
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Aliakbar Akbaritabar: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany
Tom Theile: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany
Emilio Zagheni: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

No WP-2026-029, MPIDR Working Papers from Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany

Abstract: Subnational migration is often more intensive than international migration. These systems of migration are interrelated; however, the literature studies internal and international migration separately. The main reason is that integrated data on both of these migration systems are rare. In the case of scholarly migration, in addition to differences by migration type, trends substantially differ by gender and field of science. We prepare and publicly share the second version of the Scholarly Migration Database (SMD 2.0) including global bilateral flows and rates of subnational and international migration of scholars disaggregated by gender and field of science. We leverage large-scale bibliometric data from Scopus and OpenAlex to construct an integrated history of internal and international movements of scholars at the individual level. We then aggregate these trends to the province level (GeoNames admin 1 regions). Based on our adversarial collaboration and empirical validations using independent and reproducible scientific pipelines, we develop processing steps and offer best practices for the measurement and identification of migration events. We share aggregated yearly estimates of migration rates and of bilateral flows for 2,067 unique subnational regions worldwide in Scopus and 2,080 in OpenAlex for the period 1998-2024. We describe the data structure and provide usage notes. Given the breadth of research using the first version of our database, we expect that the publicly shared second version will further enable researchers to study the causes and the consequences of gender and field differences in the migration of scholars.

Keywords: Global; World; computational social science; gender; internal migration; international migration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 Z0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 25 pages
Date: 2026
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https://www.demogr.mpg.de/papers/working/wp-2026-029.pdf (text/html)
https://github.com/MPIDR/Global-flows-and-rates-of ... igration-of-scholars (text/html)
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20487917 (text/html)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:dem:wpaper:wp-2026-029

DOI: 10.4054/MPIDR-WP-2026-029

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