  The migration of scholars is a major driver of innovation and of diffusion of
knowledge. Although large-scale bibliometric data have been used to measure
international migration of scholars, our understanding of internal migration
among researchers is very limited. This is partly due to a lack of data
aggregated at a suitable sub-national level. In this study, we analyze internal
migration in Mexico based on over 1.1 million authorship records from the
Scopus database. We trace the movements of scholars between Mexican states, and
provide key demographic measures of internal migration for the 1996-2018
period. From a methodological perspective, we develop a new framework for
enhancing data quality, inferring states from affiliations, and detecting moves
from modal states for the purposes of studying internal migration among
researchers. Substantively, we combine demographic and network science
techniques to improve our understanding of internal migration patterns within
country boundaries. The migration patterns between states in Mexico appear to
be heterogeneous in size and direction across regions. However, while many
scholars remain in their regions, there seems to be a preference for Mexico
City and the surrounding states as migration destinations. We observed that
over the past two decades, there has been a general decreasing trend in the
crude migration intensity. However, the migration network has become more dense
and more diverse, and has included greater exchanges between states along the
Gulf and the Pacific Coast. Our analysis, which is mostly empirical in nature,
lays the foundations for testing and developing theories that can rely on the
analytical framework developed by migration scholars, and the richness of
appropriately processed bibliometric data.
