Research mobility to the United States: a bibliometric analysis

This paper provides a global picture of the research mobility to the United States between 2010 and 2020 with the aim of determining whether the election of Trump acted as an influential factor on this mobility. The United States has historically been a central destination for researchers. However, many believe that the recent political climate associated with the Trump presidency affected this preeminence. To test this, we extracted a disambiguated dataset of individual researchers from the Web of Science and analyzed, for different cohorts, global mobility and mobility towards the United States. We found that for the majority of countries and groups of countries we analyzed, mobility to the United States was on the decline, particularly for the younger cohorts, while global mobility tended to increase slightly or remain stable. China, Iran and Russia are the only countries to demonstrate an increase in their mobility towards the United States. More specifically, by analyzing cohort-by-cohort mobility for a small portion of our ample (China, Iran, South Korea and Australia), we detected small drops in mobility around 2017–2018, but there is no indication that it is inclusively attributable to the isolationist policies and rhetoric of Trump.