Summary
Foreign-trained professors in the US make up about 11% of faculty but contribute disproportionately to top scientific research. The authors found these professors have bigger and more diverse collaboration networks, which helps them produce more high-impact work. When comparing within the same university and field, differences in top-tier output shrink, showing the importance of being embedded in organizational environments. However, foreign-trained faculty tend to focus their topics more narrowly once prior publication volume is considered. Overall, the paper shows how international training connects to research success through collaboration and institutional ties.
What this means in practice
- •For university research administrators: Design faculty recruitment and retention strategies that leverage foreign-trained scholars’ broader collaboration networks to enhance institutional research impact.
- •For science policy analysts: Inform national policies on science workforce mobility by quantifying the role of foreign-trained faculty in high-impact research production.
Authors
Erjia Yan, Chaoqun Ni, Xiang Zheng, Weiye Gu
Abstract
Internationally mobile scientists are central to national research and innovation systems. We link faculty rosters from the Academic Analytics Research Center to OpenAlex publication records for 2011-2020, yielding more than 12 million faculty-publication observations for 236,394 tenure-system faculty at more than 300 major U.S. universities. Foreign-trained faculty, defined by a terminal degree awarded outside the United States, constitute about 11% of the observed faculty workforce but account for 13-14% of publications and 14-16% of top-1% cited elite output. We find that this elevated representation in elite output is closely related to their organizational embeddedness: when faculty are compared within the same institution, scientific domain, rank, and year, the difference in elite output narrow substantially while overall productivity and collaboration differences persist within those settings. In addition, foreign-trained faculty enter each publication year with larger and broader prior collaboration networks, and collaborator reach is more strongly associated with subsequent elite output. By contrast, although raw topic breadth is greater among foreign-trained faculty, after accounting for prior publication volume, we find that their topic breadth is slightly narrower and more cognitively concentrated. These findings recast international training in the lens of scientific capacity and organizational integration in that internationally accumulated scientific capabilities become embedded in institutions and relationships through which research is organized and produced.