Greek chemical engineers. Are they static or mobile? Evidence from the national archive of PhD theses

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify the geographical location of researchers. Design/methodology/approach Combine standard bibliometric databases with social media data. Findings The majority of the population of the sample (71.8%) – Greek chemical engineers – are static. A significant portion of the mobile researchers (28.2%) returned to their country of origin (25.6%). Performing network analysis, the cluster of countries corresponding to the mobile category of researchers is identified and depicted. Originality/value Herein, this study introduce a new, national data set on doctorate holders that will allow multiple bibliometric analyses in the future. Also, this study is among the few (Gendronneau et al. , 2019) that combines standard bibliometric databases with social media data. In cases where multiple affiliations per year pose a difficulty in understanding the geographical location of each individual, LinkedIn data were used. The analysis sheds light on a field of science that is not extensively examined in terms of brain circulation. While similar publications focus on physicians (i.e. cardiologists – Dyachenko and Mironenko, 2018), this paper focus on a subset of doctorate holders in engineering.