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Is the research performance of Chinese returnees better than that of their local counterparts?

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Abstract

Over the past few decades, the Chinese government has issued several policies to attract overseas elites to return to China and has given them privileges in academic resource allocation. This particular treatment has provoked complaints from domestic scientists who have received no additional resources. Therefore, the research performance of returnees and their local counterparts has been widely debated. We selected 4,770 returnees and their local counterparts in the same departments of the same institutions in the same year from 1984 to 2017, and compared their research performance using regression analysis. The results show that returnees have no significant advantage in publishing more papers or first-tier journal papers, but more returnees are corresponding authors in Natural Sciences. In addition, in Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences, returnees still have an advantage in publishing more papers and in more first-tier journal papers. This study has implications for the employment policies of Chinese universities/research institutions.

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Notes

  1. Source: Interviews with CAS scientists, 2002 and 2004 (N = 86).

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Acknowledgements

We appreciate the constructive comments from Dr Chao Ma, Dr Lianghao Dai and anonymous reviewers. The manuscript is an extended version of our previous work, which was presented at the 26th International Conference on Science, Technology and Innovation Indicators (STI 2022) (Zhao et al., 2022).

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  1. School of Information Management, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210023, China

    Jingyi Zhao, Chunli Wei & Jiang Li

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  1. Jingyi Zhao
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Correspondence to Jiang Li.

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The corresponding author (Jiang Li) is a member of the Distinguished Reviewers Board of Scientometrics.

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Zhao, J., Wei, C. & Li, J. Is the research performance of Chinese returnees better than that of their local counterparts?. Scientometrics 128, 3091–3105 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04693-7

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