Andrew C. Herman, Jens Peter Andersen, Mathias Wullum Nielsen
Sociological Science September 21, 2026
10.15195/v13.a43
Abstract
As universities and doctoral training expand in low- and middle-income (LMI) countries, transnational scientific mobility is rising. This trend is often framed as “brain circulation,” implying a mutual exchange of talent and knowledge to the benefit of all countries involved. We track 12 million scientists over 15 years, stratified by performance, to weigh this view against the prediction from structural dependency theory that expanding scientific capacity in lower-income countries may intensify rather than attenuate the loss of top-performing talent to wealthier countries. Our findings temper the brain circulation account. Circulatory migration rates have declined over time, even as the net losses from migration for LMI countries have risen. Not one of the countries that together produce 90 percent of LMI countries’ top-cited early-career scientists achieves a net migration gain relative to high-income countries. It has become more difficult for developing countries to offset migratory losses with the spillovers from circulation.
As universities and doctoral training expand in low- and middle-income (LMI) countries, transnational scientific mobility is rising. This trend is often framed as “brain circulation,” implying a mutual exchange of talent and knowledge to the benefit of all countries involved. We track 12 million scientists over 15 years, stratified by performance, to weigh this view against the prediction from structural dependency theory that expanding scientific capacity in lower-income countries may intensify rather than attenuate the loss of top-performing talent to wealthier countries. Our findings temper the brain circulation account. Circulatory migration rates have declined over time, even as the net losses from migration for LMI countries have risen. Not one of the countries that together produce 90 percent of LMI countries’ top-cited early-career scientists achieves a net migration gain relative to high-income countries. It has become more difficult for developing countries to offset migratory losses with the spillovers from circulation.
 | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. |
Supplemental Materials
Reproducibility Package: All codes used in conducting this analysis are available at the OSF project repository here: https://osf.io/tkh2a/. Aggregated data are available in the same repository so that plots and analyses can be reproduced. The disaggregated data from the Web of Science as well as the augmented version from the Center for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University are proprietary and as such cannot be shared.
- Citation: Herman, Andrew C., Jens Peter Andersen, and Mathias Wullum Nielsen. 2026. “Developing Countries Face Falling Circulation Rates and Rising Migration Losses in Science” Sociological Science 13: 1132-1158.
- Received: June 2, 2026
- Accepted: July 31, 2026
- Editors: Stephen Vaisey, Herman van de Werfhorst
- DOI: 10.15195/v13.a43