Internal Migration of Scientists in Russia and the USA : The Case of Applied Physics

When scientists change jobs they bring to their new workplace the experience, tacit knowledge and social ties they acquired at their previous workplace. Not only is the level of mobility important when discussing knowledge transfer between academic organizations or between regions, but the topology of mobility network is also of crucial importance. This study presents a comparison of the structure of internal migration networks for Russian and American physicists, more specifically for scholars working in the field of applied physics. To build a migration network, we selected physicists who had changed their city of affiliation between 2009 and 2013/2014. Data on scientists’ affiliations were obtained from the Web of Science. After the structures of two networks were compared, we formulated a hypothesis of how the features of the network are connected to the overall scientific productivity of the system