A Sample Approach to Validating the Use of Publication Metadata to Track Swedish Researcher Mobility

We examine the extent to which metadata for publications indexed in Scopus reflect the career placements of researchers at universities and other organisations. Our study focuses on a sample of researchers affiliated to three Swedish universities to explore the amenability of this data for tracking researcher mobility patterns. Using a desk-research approach, we locate publicly available details of employment and then compare those organisations and timeframes to the affiliation names and dates listed on publications, across 30 researchers connected to Swedish universities. Although the sample size is small, our findings demonstrate that the use of publication metadata is broadly reliable for tracking the mobility of researchers as they move between organisations: more than seven out of ten universities and other organisations do appear in the publication metadata. In a smaller majority of cases, the publication metadata was also accurate in terms of depicting the timing of career placements, although lags are common.