Studying the brain drain: Can bibliometric methods help?

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.