  Germany has become a major country of immigration, as well as a research
powerhouse in Europe. As Germany spends a higher fraction of its GDP on
research and development than most countries with advanced economies, there is
an expectation that Germany should be able to attract and retain international
scholars who have high citation performance. Using an exhaustive set of over
eight million Scopus publications, we analyze the trends in international
migration to and from Germany among published researchers over the past 24
years. We assess changes in institutional affiliations for over one million
researchers who have published with a German affiliation address at some point
during the 1996-2020 period. We show that while Germany has been highly
integrated into the global movement of researchers, with particularly strong
ties to the US, the UK, and Switzerland, the country has been sending more
published researchers abroad than it has attracted. While the balance has been
largely negative over time, analyses disaggregated by gender, citation
performance, and field of research show that compositional differences in
migrant flows may help to alleviate persistent gender inequalities in selected
fields.

Digital Libraries;Computers and Society