Page 15 - IDEA Study 02 2020 Recruitment of Researchers
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WHERE DO UNIVERSITIES RECRUIT RESEARCHERS? 2020      Main findings Figures 1–11 provide the main results by discipline. Generalizations may be tricky, because, not suprisingly, the results are a bit different for each discipline; however; there seem to be several broad patterns across the board. When employing researchers, the most inward-looking prove to be the national flagship universities of the Visegrad countries: the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary. More than half of their current researchers are shown to have linkages to the same university already at the start of their careers. In contrast, hiring researchers originally from outside is most prevalent in the leading universities in the United States and United Kingdom, including Princeton and Oxford. Fewer than a quarter of their current researchers began their research careers at the same university. Nevertheless, the Visegrad universities are similar in this respect to KU Leuven, the University of Vienna and Lund University in many disciplines. The main dividing line does not seem not to follow the traditional ‘East vs. West’ differences, but rather tends to highlight the gap between those institutions at the top of global university rankings and the rest. As can be expected, the flipside of employing researchers whose research careers began at the same university is low internationalization. Cosmopolitan universities in smaller countries, in particular ETH Zürich, maintain the highest shares of researchers with origins from abroad, while a strong national focus is the hallmark of universities in the Visegrad countries. If the initial location indicator is changed from the university to the city (only available in the interactive application), the tendency to hire from outside naturally appears smaller, especially for the universities that already had a high tendency to hire from inside, and those located in large cities. These sometimes have more than three-quarters of their current researchers originating from the same city. Nevertheless, a comparison of junior and senior researchers (only available in the interactive application) does not reveal a clear overall trend. Several universities noticeably decreased their propensity to employ researchers originally from inside, including KU Leuven, Lund University and the University of Warsaw. However, there is also an opposite tendency, most notably at the University of Szeged and Comenius University. For the underlying data see Annex A2 . 13 


































































































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