Reconstructing bibliometric methods for studying mobility

Understanding how the international or regional mobility of researchers affects the production of knowledge has become a fundamental goal in research on science and innovation. Bibliometric methods that use the affiliations on publications to infer when researchers move marked a large step forward in this respect. While the field now has multiple ways of going about this work, it has not paid close attention to the impact that differences in research assumptions have on reported results. This paper introduces a new framework for classifying researcher mobility in bibliometric data, the tenure events method, that makes full use of the advantages of existing approaches while avoiding their main pitfalls, improving the overall quality of resulting classifications. It also explicitly parameterizes three key research decisions, rendering the method more transparent than what already exists, and making it easier to run sensitivity checks in the spirit of researcher degrees of freedom and multiversal analysis. The new method is implemented with biblio.migration, an R package introduced here in the hopes of facilitating more robust research in the area.