  The international migration of researchers is an important dimension of
scientific mobility, and has been the subject of considerable policy debate.
However, tracking the migration life courses of researchers is challenging due
to data limitations. In this study, we use Scopus bibliometric data on eight
million publications from 1.1 million researchers who have published at least
once with an affiliation address from Germany in 1996-2020. We construct the
partial life histories of published researchers in this period and explore both
their out-migration and the subsequent return of a subset of this group: the
returnees. Our analyses shed light on the career stages and gender disparities
between researchers who remain in Germany, those who emigrate, and those who
eventually return. We find that the return migration streams are even more
gender imbalanced, which points to the need for additional efforts to encourage
female researchers to come back to Germany. We document a slightly declining
trend in return migration among more recent cohorts of researchers who left
Germany, which, for most disciplines, was associated with a decrease in the
German collaborative ties of these researchers. Moreover, we find that the
gender disparities for the most gender imbalanced disciplines are unlikely to
be mitigated by return migration given the gender compositions of the cohorts
of researchers who have left Germany and of those who have returned. This
analysis uncovers new dimensions of migration among scholars by investigating
the return migration of published researchers, which is critical for the
development of science policy.
