Articles

Place is an important factor influencing international student mobility (ISM). However, few studies have comprehensively examined the role of place in ISM. This special issue intends to narrow this gap by considering the role of place in ISM from different perspectives. The articles contributing to the special issue discuss three dimensions of place, namely the physical characteristics of place, the meanings and valuations of place, and social inequalities associated with place. The special issue highlights several theoretical, methodological, and empirical avenues to further advance research on the role of place in ISM.

The number of researchers' publications is a widely used proxy measure for scientific output, individual achievement, and performance. Despite well-known criticism from the bibliometric community, the use of bibliometric databases as a basis for measuring publication output is widespread. At the same time, there are established survey instruments that also measure the publication output per researcher. We use survey-bibliometric matching with Scopus publication records to compare the alternative publication counts. A Scopus author ID match could be found for 70 % of the respondent researchers. The number of publications per researcher varies greatly between these data sources. [...]

The citations to open access preprint versions of papers and citations to papers in journals translated to English are not regularly counted in major proprietary citation index databases or in ordinary bibliometric research assessment even though they arguably reflect a true part of a work’s scientific impact. Here we explore the extent of these phenomena using Web of Science data.

This study examines how well an idiosyncratic authorship counting rule for co-authored publications recommended by the German Science Foundation (DFG) for medical schools and widely used in performance-based funding systems aligns with the empirical evidence. The DFG rule and two other co-author credit rules are compared with empirical data of percentage contribution statements of authors of co-authored papers in medicine.

Here we study how the lengths of the periods from submission to acceptance (review duration) and from acceptance to publication (publication delay) relate to research quality, as operationalized by F1000Prime recommendations, for a large dataset of publications from the life and health sciences. We find a statistically detectable relationship between shorter peer review duration and recommendations, but its effect size is negligibly small.

This study investigates whether researchers whose published research record is more thematically broad —covering more, and more semantically distant, topics— are also characterized by specific patterns in their mobility between research organizations and countries and their co-authorship patterns. We study a large sample of productive authors in STEM fields who have been active in Germany. Our results show that specific types of international mobility go together with slightly elevated epistemic breadth. But scientists with larger co-author networks have relatively greater epistemic breadth. [...]

We contribute to research on social inequalities in educational attainment by examining the role of institutional contexts for students’ study abroad (SA) intent and participation. To do so, we extend the individual-level rational choice model predicting SA intent and participation depending on students’ socioeconomic status (SES) into a multi-level model emphasizing the importance of context effects. We test our model based on unique micro-level student data, which we supplement with context data. Examining 18,510 students nested in 69 universities, we provide the first in-depth multi-level analyses of SA intent and participation of students from Japan.

Following the outbreak of the war on Ukraine, Europe experienced a strong rise in inflation in 2022/23, which posed and partially continues to pose major challenges for companies, workers, consumers, and governments. Students were also affected by inflation. We take the recent inflation as an opportunity to take a long-term look back at how inflation has affected students in Europe.