Page 23 - IDEA Study 02 2020 Recruitment of Researchers

WHERE DO UNIVERSITIES RECRUIT RESEARCHERS? 2020 Concluding remarks Overall, this study demonstrates that relevant insights about academic mobility can be derived from evidence on the affiliations of researchers, which is regularly recorded in published journal articles. This is important because this type of evidence is very difficult, if not impossibile, to obtain from other existing sources, especially in a broad international and interorganization comparison. Jones and Sloan (2019) found that the share of professors at top economics departments in the United States who received their doctorates at the same workplace was only 5% at Yale University, 7% at the University of California, Berlekey, 11% at the University of Chicago, 12% at Princeton University, 24% at Stanford University and 28% at Harvard University and MIT, which is broadly in line with the proportions identified in this study based on bibliometrics. Science Europe (2013) is a rare example of an earlier study that engaged in a similar exercise to this study, albeit only at the country level, dealing only with international mobility and disregarding differences between disciplines. Their results showed that during the period 1996–2011, the most ‘sedentary’ researchers were those employed in the new EU member countries of Eastern Europe, including the Visegrad group, and southern European countries; this is also very much in line with our findings. Some of the flagship universities in Visegrad countries, which produce the best research in their respective national contexts, could arguably gain little from hiring researchers from elsewhere in the same country. However, it is likely that they would benefit from drawing more on the best available talent from abroad, perhaps from countries with similar (or even lower) wage levels in Eastern Europe or in the developing world. The main barriers to more hiring from abroad are likely to be twofold. First, the Visegrad universities do not always announce calls for new positions internationally, so foreign candidates may be unaware of openings. Second, the Visegrad universities may not be attractive to foreigners not only because of their relatively low salaries, but also because of outdated human resources practices, including conditions for early career researchers, rigid career development paths and teaching requirements, and administration and grant schemes predominantly in local languages. The best practices of merit-based and international hiring are slowly proliferating at Visegrad universities, but progress remains limited to individual workplaces and positions, rather than constituting a broad trend that would be noticeable in the overall data. Indeed, system-wide changes would require bold structural reforms of the national researcher’s labour markets, which are notoriously difficult to design and implement. 21