Researcher’s mobility in location and disciplinary focus: Bibliometric data utilization for Finland-based scholars for the duration of 2008-2018

Scientific discoveries are a result of global collaboration and often collaborations are multidisciplinary in nature. A core element of these successful collaborations will materialize trough researcher’s mobility in location and disciplinary focus. Researchers experience a numerous opportunity to practice locational mobility throughout their carriers as well as conducting a multidisciplinary research. Both changes have short- and long-term impact on individual researchers and science, technology and innovation system which has immediate interest for public and private research and development funding mechanisms. With advancement in data science tools and increasing of computational capacities, we are able to utilize bibliometric data for calculating researcher’s mobility on location and disciplinary focus over time. We looked at Finland as a case and by incorporating the analytical procedures, the processed data is capable to deliver insights for researchers mobilities between cities over time as well as disciplinary change over the course of time.

The dataset is consists of identified Finland based scholar’s mobility (location and disciplinary focus) over the courses of 10 years (2008-2018). Clarivate Analytics’s Web of Science (WoS) is selected as the data source for compiling the dataset. We consider the WoS to be a more appropriate database for our compiled data set for several reasons. First, as a global citation database and comprehensive platform with over 159 million records and over 1.7 billion cited references, the WoS can track ideas across time and disciplines. Second, comparative and longitudinal studies have shown a consistent and reasonably stable quarterly growth for both publications and citations in the WoS Core Collection database. Third, WoS data structure is favorable so to consistently construct the scholars change of affiliation and subject category focus much accurately compared to other indexing services.

We used the ”Advance Search” in the Web of Science and selected Core Collection database in order to search for all publication types between 2008-2018 where at least one of the authors has been based in Finland. From the raw bibliometric data retrieved, certain procedure took place so analyze, filter, clean and process the change of authors’ affiliation over their career trajectory also picking up the occasions where disciplinary focus has changed in authors publication profile.

This dataset can reveal hidden dynamics on scholar’s career progress. The dataset (if) combined with funding information and mission-oriented policies can evaluate the long-lasting effect of instruments in mobilizing researchers, steering research agendas and consequently the resulted impacts. The final data set is provided in four individual XLSX files.