Gokhan Aykac, Gazi Univ Dept of Econ & Harvard Law School
Gokhan Aykac, Gazi Univ Dept of Econ & Harvard Law School
SBBI Seminar: "The Value of an Overseas Research Trip"
SBBI Seminar: "The Value of an Overseas Research Trip"
13 Apr 201812:00 PM – 1:30 PM
Harvard community only
This study provides a novel approach to understand and explain the effects of the
overseas mobility of the scientists on their scientific productivity as well as on
their scientific collaborations and their contributions to diffusion and impact on
science. The research also set out to determine how these relations differ between
the foreign scientists who have stayed at the USA and who had returned to their home
country, as well as investigating the difference that might occur for destination
countries other than the USA.
Our comparative case set-up is based on Abadie et al. (2010)’s synthetic control approach
that uses data-driven procedures to construct suitable comparison groups. We employed
a unique comparison control group design which utilizes immobile scientists’ publication
based characteristics to construct a synthetic-author for each mobile scientist. We
constructed the author sample from Turkish named authors as Turkey is assigned as
the departure country. The methodology of this study can be applied to any departure
and destination country.
It has not escaped our attention that our comparative case set-up suggests a remarkable
increase in the scientific productivity of the mobile authors. Our results also show
that an overseas research trip considerably adds to the contributions to diffusion
and impact on science. Findings of the study confirm the notable importance of overseas
research trip on scientific productivity of the scientists.