STM publisher Elsevier has said that, according to its recent analysis, India has a 0.6 percent net inflow of scientists. It also said that the incoming scientists and short-term visiting (or transitory) scientists are significantly more productive than scientists who remain in India and scientists that leave the country. India, according to the study, is not losing productive brains, but is in fact an importer of productive brains.
Using Elsevier's Scopus database, publication data was studied over a 15-year period tracking migration streams of scientists using their affiliations and hence the country they publish in. The size of the migration streams was analysed revealing that 64.1 percent of the scientists stayed within India during the 15-year study period, 23.4 percent were visiting (or transitory) researchers (traveling in or out of India for a period less than 2 years), 6.6 percent moved to and 6.0 percent left India; summing up to a net inflow of 0.6 percent.
The level of productivity of these migration groups was measured by publication output and expressed relative to India's country average publication output set to one. Analyses showed that incoming scientists (6.6 percent of the total number of scientists studied) are most productive (1.38 where 1.00 is the average publication output for India), visiting or transitory scientists (23.4 percent) are almost as productive (1.34), while outgoing scientists (6.0 percent) are below average in productivity (0.95).
These results can be put into international context by comparison with the UK and China. Both the UK and China display similar patterns as India: all three countries import scientists that are more productive than their country average and they all export scientists that are less productive.
Group size comparative analyses of outgoing scientists revealed: 6.0 percent for India, 10.0 percent for UK and 2.1 percent for China; with productivity levels at 0.95, 0.92 and 0.99 respectively, consistently below country publication average for all three countries.
Group size comparative analyses of incoming scientists revealed: 6.6 percent for India, 8.5 percent for UK and 7.1 percent for China; with productivity levels at 1.38, 1.14 and 1.85 respectively; consistently higher than country publication average for all three countries, and significantly higher for India and China.
Group size comparative analyses of visiting (or transitory) scientists revealed: 23.4 percent for India, 44.4 percent for UK and 16.0 percent for China, with productivity levels at 1.34, 1.24 and 1.22 respectively; again more productive than country publication averages.
Group size comparative analyses of staying scientists in the15-year study period revealed: 64.1 percent for India, 37.2 percent for UK and 74.9 percent for China, with productivity levels 0.75, 0.60 and 0.74 respectively; all significantly below the country averages, with the UK being the least productive.
Further comparing level of mobility (incoming, visiting and outgoing), it was found that mobility is substantially higher for the UK compared to China or India with 62.8 percent of all scientists from the UK moving around during the 15-year study period, compared to 35.9 percent for India and 25.1 percent for China.
