Scholarly Migration Database
Quantifying the Mobility of Scholars
The Scholarly Migration Database provides detailed data about the mobility of scholars. Scientists, journalists and policy analysts who are interested in the movements of published researchers can access high-quality datasets and estimates via this website. The Scholarly Migration Database is prepared and hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany.
New version: SMD 2.0 is available since June 2026!
The new version is based on newer data (April 2026 for OpenAlex, October 2025 for Scopus) and adds more dissaggregations: Gender, field of science and subnational location.
Go to the download section to find the new data downloads. We are updating the website during the next weeks with more information about the new data and new interactive visualizations. If you have any questions, please contact us via email.
Data processing
The Scopus bibliometric database strives to have all the metadata about every published journal article since 1996.
We use the affiliation information and the author identifier to track movements of individual researchers from country to country.
We then aggregate the migration events to get in- out- and net-migration counts for every country.
See the DATA page for a detailed explanation of the data processing steps.