Global Portuguese Scientists (GPS): An Academic Social Network to Assess Mobility in Science

International scientific mobility has a significant impact on mobile researchers, the co-creation and sharing of knowledge, and the competitiveness of individual research institutions and nation states. Despite the political importance of mobility in science, there is no systematic effort to analyze and characterize the phenomenon. We argue that information provided by a social network may contribute to fill in this informational gap. This work presents the Portuguese academic social network GPS (Global Portuguese Scientists - https://gps.pt/), and analyses the data stored along almost one year after its launch (between November 2016 and September 2017), in order to explore its potentials in mobility studies. Using an unique data set containing the research experiences entered by the Portuguese researchers registered on the platform, the results of this empirical research provide interesting insights into the international dimension of the research careers of community’s members, focusing on four main questions: i) how many users are on GPS; ii) who are they (in term of sex and age); iii) what have they been doing (position held, scientific research area, duration of each research experience); iv) where have they been working (country, continent, distance from Portugal). A descriptive and inferential statistical analysis is presented, both to i) describe the evolution of the number and characteristics of GPS scientists registered on the platform and ii) establish associations across the variables in each of these major dimensions in order to characterize mobility patterns of the GPS scientists. More specially, the intent is to understand whether there are significant differences in the profile of Portuguese researchers (both in term of socio-demographic characteristics and the kind of research they have been doing abroad) depending on the location where they carried out their research activities. The results of this empirical research provide interesting insights into the international dimension of the research careers of community’s members, allowing to characterise the spatial patterns of the mobility of Portuguese researchers, and giving the opportunity to monitor the academic path of the Portuguese scientists across the world.