75 Years of Migration Research: A Global Bibliometric Overview

Yacine Boujija , Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique
Ana Cañedo, Université de Montréal

This paper presents a large-scale bibliometric analysis of international migration research produced over the past 75 years. The study aims to provide a quantitative overview of the field’s geographic and thematic composition, as well as its evolving patterns of scientific collaboration/citation networks. It forms part of a broader project to comprehensively catalogue global research on migration using open-access bibliographic infrastructures. Building on recent advances in open access bibliographic data, large language models (LLMs), and semantic text analysis, the project proposes both a large-scale empirical mapping and the creation of an open, extensible database for future research. Metadata were collected from OpenAlex for an initial sample of pre-identified migration papers and journals (N = 39,222) and expanded through iterative citation-based snowballing. Papers were classified using LLM assistance and thematically structured with BERTopic, a transformer-based topic modeling framework. The resulting corpus was geographically localized to identify not only the places of production but also the destinations (or contexts) and origins studied. Preliminary results highlight the global predominance of studies on international migration and reveal marked geographic and thematic asymmetries, particularly a persistent focus on western destination contexts and on a few overrepresented migration corridors such as Mexico–U.S., China–U.S., and Syria–Turkey. By systematically mapping how migration is studied across time, space, and disciplines, this work lays the groundwork for further investigation and will contribute to ongoing debates on the scope, fragmentation, and epistemological boundaries of migration studies, while providing an open empirical foundation for comparative and reflexive analyses of the global research landscape.

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 Presented in Session 66. International Migration