International student mobility spurs scientific research on foreign countries: Evidence from international students studying in China

The international mobility of scientists fosters knowledge exchange by increasing cross-country research collaboration between destination and origin countries. To the best of our knowledge, the mobility of international students, most of whom are not scientists, has not been linked to knowledge production involving both destination and origin countries in previous studies. The question of this research is whether international student mobility (ISM) contributes to science in China. To address this research question, we determined the annual number of international students studying in Chinese universities from 1999 to 2018, from the Concise Statistics of International Students in China compiled by the International Exchange Department of the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, and corresponding publication records including the source country names in the titles, from the Web of Science database of Clarivate Analytics. We then used the fixed-effects negative binomial model and instrumental variable approach to explore the linkage from ISM to knowledge production and found that ISM led to the destination countries’ scientific research on foreign countries. The findings shed light on the discussion of the global mobility of talent, and contribute to the understanding of ISM's influence on science, the measurement of which is promising in future studies.