Abstract
International scientific mobility and research careers are two concepts that are intimately related. Yet, it has been very difficult for scholarship to pinpoint exactly how international mobility impacts on research careers. This paper contributes to this question by investigating links between international mobility, research career stage progression and job changes. It does so using a large-scale survey (MORE) which targets researchers based in European universities. The results establish that the profile of international mobility varies by academic research career stage. They also show that for researchers in the established mid-career phase who are working internationally, there are career advancement benefits associated with return mobility to their home country. However, these benefits may reduce if the timing of return is too delayed. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these results for researcher mobility policy in the context of the European Higher Education Area and the European Research Area.
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Notes
Individual researchers currently working in the EU include researchers working in the EU27 plus three associated countries (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland) and three candidate countries in 2012 (Croatia, Macedonia (FYROM), Turkey), with and without EU citizenship or residence (IDEA Consult et al. 2013: 55, 45).
Previous papers using the first MORE survey dataset were published by the co-designers of the questionnaire instrument (Børing et al. 2015) or included a substantial technical annex detailing the treatment of the sub-sample used, but without discussion of the issues involved in data re-use (Veugelers and Van Bouwel 2015).
See Veugelers and Van Bouwel (2015) for discussion of this weakness in the prior MORE study.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the European Commission for facilitating access to the survey data, IDEA Consult for high quality project documentation and helpful advice on the conduct of the MORE series of studies, and Eric Iversen (NIFU) for expert clarification on data issues.
Funding
This research was partly supported by funding received from the Research Infrastructure for Research and Innovation Policy Studies project (RISIS, contract number 313082).
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Carolina Cañibano wishes to declare that she was contracted as an expert by IDEA Consult to provide advice on the Spanish institutional framework for Higher Education and Research Careers. This activity in no way influences the analysis and findings contained in this paper. She did not contribute to the design or development of the MORE2 higher education survey used in this paper. The other authors have no potential conflict of interest to declare.
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Appendix: Descriptive statistics
Appendix: Descriptive statistics
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Cañibano, C., D’Este, P., Otamendi, F.J. et al. Scientific careers and the mobility of European researchers: an analysis of international mobility by career stage. High Educ 80, 1175–1193 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00536-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00536-z