The Mobility of Researchers Between China and the US

The mobility of researchers helps knowledge transmission and collaboration in the process of globalization, and is becoming a major policy objective in recent years. Research system and the individual researcher can benefit from mobility. As a developing country, China is trying to do more to learn from developed countries, including academic exchange. The US is the world's largest talent magnet. It is meaningful to study the researcher mobility between China and the US. Based on Scopus author data, the researchers are divided into 3 groups on the perspective of China, which are outflow group, transitory group and inflow group. According to a set of 728421 active researchers in this study, China has a net total inflow of researchers from the US in the period of 1996 to 2015. Different classes of researchers performances differently in production quantity and quality. The Brain Inflow produced most paper among all the researchers; the Transitory Brain Mobility has highest quality production among the 3 groups. The production quality of Brain Outflow is much better than the Brain Inflow. The characteristic of researcher movement between the two countries and its impacts should be better understood to help talent development.