This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A study based on publication data traces how researchers moved within Ukraine and across borders between 2009 and 2022, with conflict-affected regions losing scholars while others became increasingly important destinations. These shifts were already underway after Russia illegally annexed Crimea and fighting began in the Donbas in 2014, underscoring that scholarly mobility during conflict cannot simply be understood as a matter of free choice.
Two days after Russian forces attacked Ukraine on multiple fronts in February 2022, the hashtag #ScienceForUkraine was already mobilizing international support for researchers affected by the war. Scholars are only one of the many groups whose lives and work are disrupted by armed conflict, but they are also commonly considered highly skilled migrants. Because their qualifications are sought after internationally, scholars are often assumed to have relatively good opportunities to decide whether and where to go.
In a new article published in Population and Development Review, Michael Zaslavsky (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Aliakbar Akbaritabar (MPIDR and University of Rostock) put this assumption to the test by asking what happens to scholarly mobility when war restricts those choices. "The full-scale invasion made the displacement of Ukrainian researchers particularly visible, but our study shows that they were already leaving affected regions for other parts of Ukraine and abroad after Russia illegally annexed Crimea and fighting began in the Donbas in 2014," summarizes Akbaritabar. To reconstruct these movements, Akbaritabar and Zaslavsky turned to one of the richest digital trails scholars leave behind: their scientific publications.
These publications record the institutional affiliations of their authors—the universities, research institutes or other organizations they are professionally connected to. By examining affiliation data for tens of thousands of researchers region by region and following changes from 2009 to 2022, the authors could estimate scholarly mobility over more than a decade at an unusually fine geographical level. The results point to a redrawing of Ukraine's scholarly map after 2014, but not to one uniform pattern.
Between 2015 and 2017, Donetsk and Luhansk, the two main regions of the Donbas, were losing researchers on balance to other parts of Ukraine: for every 1,000 actively publishing scholars, there were about 54 more leaving than arriving in Donetsk and 46 more in Luhansk. Looking at mobility across national borders, Crimea stands out: International migration there produced a net loss of about 117 researchers per 1,000. Donetsk also recorded a substantial international loss of about 66 per 1,000.
Behind these losses, different dynamics were at work. While some regions saw more researchers leave for institutions abroad, others registered fewer arrivals from other countries. Even so, more scholars left than arrived in the east of the country.
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