The Horizon 2020 project, CrossMigration, led by IMISCOE, has been running since March 2018 and will come to an end on 29 February 2020. The whole project has been geared towards facilitating systematic knowledge accumulation in migration studies, especially through its main output, IMISCOE’s very own interactive Migration Research Hub.
The team behind this work comprises a consortium of fifteen different institutes across Europe. The consortium also collaborated with a research network of IMISCOE member institutes, and a policy network of governmental and non-governmental representatives from European, national, and local levels of migration governance. This collaboration has taken place in several events including conferences held in conjunction with IMISCOE, workshops with policy stakeholders in Brussels, and thematic expert meetings on migration drivers, infrastructures, forms, governance, policy indicators, and scenarios.
The completion of the project will be marked at its closing conference in Lisbon on 5-6 February 2020, just prior to the IMISCOE Spring conference, where we will reflect on the coming of age of migration studies and debate the evolution – past, present, and future – of the field.
The Migration Research Hub
The end product of CrossMigration is the Migration Research Hub (migrationresearch.com), a go-to resource for finding knowledge on migration under one roof.
Containing information on nearly 100,000 resources, including journal articles, book series, datasets, and projects, the Research Database is the biggest part of the Hub. Through a partnership between IMISCOE and Clarivate-Web of Science, the project’s ICT developer, Youngminds, has made a way for the database to be automatically kept up-to-date. Youngminds also use other sources, such as CrossRef and Scopus to populate it.
Everything in the database is associated with at least one part of the taxonomy of migration studies. During the first year of the project, scholars from IMISCOE and around the world, representing various disciplines, worked hard on building a theoretically robust classification system for migration research. Items that are indexed in the Hub get linked via a complex search algorithm to topics, disciplines, methods, and geographical focuses. Users can also edit the taxonomy associations for their own research. You can see the structure of the taxonomy here:
Since the goal of the Hub is to stimulate collaboration in migration studies, it also contains an Expert Database, which will soon be replacing the IMISCOE Web Directory. Here you can create a profile, add your publications and, using the Hub’s integration with ORCiD, import projects and other research information. Soon, these expert profiles will also be linked to IMISCOE Standing Committees, and, as part of the wider renewal of the IMISCOE website, the ReSOMA expert database!
As well as indexing existing knowledge, the Migration Research Hub showcases the results of systematic analyses of policy indicators and scenarios of possible future realities of migration. In the final months of the project, Youngminds are building interactive tools designed to help researchers better measure migration policies and to assess the likelihood and implications of different migration scenarios for Europe in 2030.
As for future resources from the project, the final work package will produce a strategic research agenda with advice on future funding of migration research in Europe. More broadly, a textbook of migration studies, linked to the Hub, is coming next year. This will introduce students to the key literature in the field, based on knowledge accumulation reports produced during the project. As well as this, short booklets on key knowledge questions for policymakers, highlighting the scholarship on drivers, infrastructures, forms, and governance, will also be published.
This has been one of IMISCOE’s biggest projects. With an interactive Migration Research Hub now in place to bring knowledge under one roof, it will hopefully also become one of the most rewarding, not just for the network but for the whole field of migration studies.
Prof.dr. Peter Scholten, Dr. Asya Pisarevskaya, and Nathan Levy on behalf of the CrossMigration team