Returnee and local doctorates on research productivity: doctoral training, international mobility, and research collaboration

The increasing internationalization of Higher Education Institutions has facilitated universities from East Asian countries like Taiwan, Korea, and China to value university rankings more in enhancing their admissions and reputation. Especially when Taiwan and China are all considered belonging to Chinese social community, returnee doctorates are assumed to possess international experience that is theoretically helpful to improve their research productivity and university employers generally prefer foreign-trained doctorates. However, there is little research to prove that returnee doctorates are more productive than local doctorates because of more frequent international mobility. This research examines a University in Taiwan, a prominent academic research university, credible for its research productivity. From the perspective of bibliometrics, this study used the Scopus International Academic Database to identify publications, citations, and Field Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) as credible indicators of research productivity, controlling for personal background, doctoral training, international mobility, and research collaboration. We hope that the differences in research productivity between local and returnee doctorates can be measured more comprehensively and objectively. The results of this study found that there is a significant difference in the higher FWCI score of research publications between local and returnee doctorates, and further found that there is a significant positive relationship between local doctorates, published papers during doctoral studies, prestige of supervisors, and international and domestic research collaboration on research productivity. Those that identified international mobility in careers had a stronger impact on research productivity compared to those of the doctorate educating stage, and both international and domestic research collaboration were important for research productivity. The results based on empirical analysis broke the myths of returnee doctorate corresponding to high research productivity in this study, and can serve as a reference for faculty recruitment and research environment enhancement in research-oriented universities in Taiwan and other Asian countries. Policy implications are also discussed.