INTERNATIONAL MOBILITY OF BRAZILIAN RESEARCHERS: AN ANALYSIS WITH OPENALEX

ANÁLISE COM A OPENALEX

Abstract

International academic mobility is widely recognized as one of the main mechanisms for the production and circulation of scientific knowledge, with relevant implications for national science, technology and innovation systems. In the Brazilian case, available studies are restricted to specific funding programs or delimited fields of knowledge, frequently based on proprietary databases with limited coverage. This study aims to describe the international mobility patterns of Brazilian researchers across all fields of knowledge, based on an original methodological pipeline developed to identify and classify inward, outward, return and circular mobility movements from institutional affiliations recorded in OpenAlex. A total of 2,028,474 researcher profiles were processed, of which 291,664 were classified as eligible after the application of quality and consistency criteria. Researchers were classified into five mobility categories: Non-Migrants (48.73%), Return Migrants (41.64%), Immigrants (2.52%), Transient Migrants (0.62%) and Emigrants (0.26%). Analysis of transition matrices identified 115,639 cross-country movements, with predominance of the Brazil-United States and Brazil-Portugal corridors. The results indicate that Brazilian scientific mobility is predominantly characterized by circulation and return patterns, challenging brain drain narratives. The proposed methodology is replicable and anchored in open infrastructure, representing a contribution to the production of national scientific mobility indicators with broader coverage, transparency and reproducibility.