Return migration to home country: a systematic literature review with text mining and topic modelling

A crucial (and less developed) part of migration studies is the exploration of migrant’s further mobility and the intention of return to home country at some point in life. Knowing who, why and when returns matters for both the host and the home country. Very few studies have focused on return in a wider perspective, adopting a comparative approach. The present study aims at providing a systematic review of peer-reviewed literature indexed in Scopus database, to understand how return has been dealt with by researchers. The main objectives are: collecting and synthetizing previous studies; comparing approaches, conceptualizations of return, methods and variable of interest. A bibliometric analysis on metadata and content analysis based on text mining and topic modelling techniques has been conducted on a sample of approximately 3,000 publications. With our contribution, we expect to implement a baseline for theoretical development and empirical research, presenting an overview on the evolution of trend topics, with regional and temporal patterns of research focus and identifying knowledge gaps in literature.