The impact of international mobility in doctoral training in novel research groups: A case study

Abstract

Mobility of doctoral students is considered a critical factor which contributes to the doctoral graduate research performance and the knowledge transfer. The research productivity of doctoral students is still more critical for those novel research groups which have to overcome several barriers before they reach a reasonable stability in research productivity. Getting started with a novel group could take several years until the group reaches a minimum productivity, depending on the field of study. Besides, internationalization of a novel group means its regular participation in the international research networks in the respective scientific domain. This contribution presents a case study of the impact of international mobility of doctoral students in the global research productivity of the hosting novel research group. The increase in research productivity due to mobility of doctoral students is shown analyzing the evolution of the number of articles published and comparing it to the critical decisions of internationalization taken by the group, suggesting a relationship between both arguments. Results show that the impact of the doctoral mobility reaches 45% of the total productivity in a period of 12 years. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.