Research policy and planning for a given country may benefit from reliable data on both its scientific workforce as well as the diaspora of scientists for countries with a substantial brain drain. Here we use a systematic approach using Scopus to generate a comprehensive country-level database of all scientists in Greece. Moreover, we expand that database to include also Greek diaspora scientists. The database that we have compiled includes 63,951 scientists who have published at least five papers indexed in Scopus. Of those, 35,116 have an affiliation in Greece. We validate the sensitivity and specificity of the database against different control sets of scientists. We also analyze the scientific disciplines of these scientists according to the Science Metrix classification (174 subfield disciplines) and provide detailed data on each of the 63,951 scientists using multiple citation indicators and a composite thereof. These analyses demonstrate differential concentrations in specific subfields for the local versus the diaspora cohorts, as well as an advantage of the diaspora cohort in terms of citation indicators, especially among top-impact researchers. The approach that we have taken can also be applied to map the scientific workforce of other countries and nations for evaluation, planning, and policy purposes.

Scopus is among the largest curated abstract and citation databases, with a wide global and regional coverage of scientific journals, conference proceedings, and books, while ensuring only the highest quality data are indexed through rigorous content selection and re-evaluation by an independent Content Selection and Advisory Board. Additionally, extensive quality assurance processes continuously monitor and improve all data elements in Scopus. Besides enriched metadata records of scientific articles, Scopus offers comprehensive author and institution profiles, obtained from advanced profiling algorithms and manual curation, ensuring high precision and recall. The trustworthiness of Scopus has led to its use as bibliometric data source for large-scale analyses in research assessments, research landscape studies, science policy evaluations, and university rankings. Scopus data have been offered for free for selected studies by the academic research community, such as through application programming interfaces, which have led to many publications employing Scopus data to investigate topics such as researcher mobility, network visualizations, and spatial bibliometrics. In June 2019, the International Center for the Study of Research was launched, with an advisory board consisting of bibliometricians, aiming to work with the scientometric research community and offering a virtual laboratory where researchers will be able to utilize Scopus data.