A gender perspective on the global migration of scholars.

Although considerable progress toward gender equality in science has been made in recent decades, female researchers continue to face significant barriers in the academic labor market. International mobility has been increasingly recognized as a strategy for scientists to expand their professional networks, and that could help narrow the gender gap in academic careers. Using bibliometric data on over 33 million Scopus publications, we provide a global and dynamic view of gendered patterns of transnational scholarly mobility, as measured by volume, distance, diversity, and distribution, from 1998 to 2017. We find that, while female researchers continued to be underrepresented among internationally mobile researchers and migrate over shorter distances, this gender gap was narrowing at a faster rate than the gender gap in the population of general active researchers. Globally, the origin and destination countries of both female and male mobile researchers became increasingly diversified, which suggests that scholarly migration has become less skewed and more globalized. However, the range of origin and destination countries continued to be narrower for women than for men. While the United States remained the leading academic destination worldwide, the shares of both female and male scholarly inflows to that country declined from around 25% to 20% over the study period, partially due to the growing relevance of China. This study offers a cross-national measurement of gender inequality in global scholarly migration that is essential for promoting gender-equitable science policies and for monitoring the impact of such interventions.

Global patterns of migration of scholars with economic development.

We leverage metadata on over 36 million journal articles and reviews indexed by Scopus in order to estimate migration of scholars based on information on changes in their institutional affiliations over time. We produce a database of yearly international migration flows of scholars, for all countries from 1998 to 2017. We use the open-access database to provide descriptive evidence on the relationship between economic development and the emigration propensity of scholars. Statistical analysis using generalized additive mixed models reveals that emigration rates initially decrease as GDP per capita increases. Then, starting from around 25,000 dollars (2017 constant international dollars at purchasing power parity), the trend reverses and emigration propensity increases as countries get richer. This U-shaped pattern contrasts with what has been found in the literature for emigration rates for the general population and calls for theoretical frameworks to understand the heterogeneous responses of migration to development.

The effect of social relationships on cognitive decline in older adults: an updated systematic review and meta-analysis of longitudinal cohort studies.

BACKGROUND: A previous meta-analysis (Kuiper et al., 2016) has shown that multiple aspects of social relationships are associated with cognitive decline in older adults. Yet, results indicated possible bias in estimations of statistical effects due to the heterogeneity of study design and measurements. We have updated this meta-analysis adding all relevant publications from 2012 to 2020 and performed a cumulative meta-analysis to map the evolution of this growing field of research (+80% of studies from 2012-2020 compared to the period considered in the previous meta-analysis). METHODS: Scopus and Web of Science were searched for longitudinal cohort studies examining structural, functional and combined effects of social relationships. We combined Odds Ratios (OR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI) using random effects meta-analysis and assessed sources of heterogeneity and the likelihood of publication bias. The risk of bias was evaluated with the Quality of Prognosis Studies in Systematic Reviews (QUIPS) tool. RESULTS: The review was prospectively registered on PROSPERO (ID: CRD42019130667). We identified 34 new articles published in 2012-2020. Poor social relationships were associated with cognitive decline with increasing precision of estimates compared to previously reviewed studies [(for structural, 17 articles, OR: 1.11; 95% CI: 1.08; 1.14) (for functional, 16 articles, OR: 1.12; 95% CI: 1.05; 1.20) (for combined, 5 articles, OR: 1.15; 95% CI: 1.06; 1.24)]. Meta-regression, risk and subgroup analyses showed that the precision of estimations improved in recent studies mostly due to increased sample sizes. CONCLUSIONS: Our cumulative meta-analysis would confirm that multiple aspects of social relationships are associated with cognitive decline. Yet, there is still evidence of publication bias and relevant information on study design is often missing, which could lead to an over-estimation of their statistical effects.