Several commentators rightly note that one of the key concerns in the development of migration studies is the uneven internationalisation of knowledge production. We are happy that our article has helped illustrating how uneven it has really been. However, several commentators argue that we could have gone further, and noted the overall Anglo-American centricity of the findings we presented. This particularly involves the invisibility of migration research from the regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America in our study. While it was not our intention to exclude any of these regions from the analysis of the field, it is true that our data collection approach, via an English-language search query of the Web of Science (WoS) database, resulted in such a bias. As DeWind (2020) rightly pointed, we, as researchers, are often limited only to our part of the “elephant”, when trying to grasp the extent of knowledge production in this tremendously expanded field. This general bias is also present in our everyday practices of conducting literature reviews and publishing, in which we often refer to publications that are written in the language(s) we publish in or read. It is clear there is much more relevant research out there than we cite in our paper, also given the word limit, in languages we do not know, or published in the journals that are not considered high quality (in terms of inclusion in the WoS database).
Being aware of the language limitations of our data collection, we indeed expected that the papers produced by the authors writing in English would be overrepresented in our analysis. We knew that because of that, it would be impossible to rightly assess the amount of research produced in the countries and regions where the main language of scientific publishing is, for instance, Chinese, French, Russian, Spanish or any other. That is why we did not aim to compare countries and regions in terms of the amount of their overall output and the importance of their scientific contributions. In the analysis of internationalisation in the field of migration studies, we compared the change in the numbers of international collaborations over time. Figure 6 (Levy et al. 2020a, 2020b) clearly shows that the amount of international co-authorships in English-language publications significantly increased between 1998 and 2018. We expect that this is a general world-wide trend, which would also be observed in publications written in other languages in countries where those languages are spoken, however this is yet to be proved.
We acknowledge the argument by Chan (2020), who pointed out that Asian scholarship on migration has not been portrayed in all its richness and variety of theoretical contributions. Nevertheless, even with the aforementioned limitations of data and highly probable underrepresentation of overall research output in this region, our analysis of internationalisation still demonstrated that the proclivity of scholars based in Asia to co-author internationally is comparatively high, with most of the research conducted in the countries where the important centres of migration research have been established. DeWind (2020) suggested in his commentary that many “immigrant scholars” from other regions, and especially from Asia, have studied in the US and advanced the field of migration research by investigating immigrant communities from the position of an “insider”. Probably some of these scholars returned to their countries of origin and continued working on migration, as well as maintaining connections with colleagues abroad. As Chan pointed out (2020), Asian scholars gave additional readership to many English-language publications on migration and advanced exploration of ‘south-south migration’ along with many other topics related to internal migration and gender and migration nexus (cf. Kofman 2020).
It is true that in the co-citation analysis we did not find a specific cluster of Asian scholarship separate from the rest. However, the names mentioned by Chan (2020) are indeed embedded in several reference networks. For instance, in the period 2004–2015 H.Z. Wang, S. Huang and B. Yeoh are located in the “Global systems school” cluster, while M. Lu is part of “Michigan-Wisconsin School”, meaning that their works are often cited together with authors from these clusters. Moreover there are many more Asian scholars in the co-citation networks but we did not trace the geography of their institutional affiliations in this particular analysis,Footnote 1 and therefore, we do not have enough evidence to demonstrate the amount or prominence of their scholarly work and the co-citation links with authors from other regions of the world.
The same argument applies to scholars from other regions. The absence of separate clusters indicating the regional focus of authors should not be interpreted as a lack of conceptual importance of this region in migration studies, because what the clusters show is the separateness of epistemic communities, not the importance. The number of citations indeed could point at the prominence of specific authors in the field, however, since our data has limitations, perhaps the citation count of authors that mainly publish in non-English language literature is not fully accounted for. To conclude, we restate that the co-citation networks of authors in our paper were not analysed in terms of their geographical spread or institutional affiliations. It would be an interesting topic for future analyses to explore patterns of internationalisation in the citation behaviour of migration researchers. Moreover, we acknowledge that for such an analysis, bibliometric data with a wider linguistic coverage should be used.