Is the research performance of Chinese returnees better than that of their local counterparts?

Chinese government issued a series of policies to attract oversea elites and gave them privileges in research, which aroused complaints from domestic scientists in the past decades. Therefore, the research performance of returnees and their local counterparts has been widely discussed. We selected 4,770 returnees and their local counterparts employed by the same departments of the same institutions in the same year from 1984 to 2017, and compared their research performance by regression analysis. Results show: (1) returnees have no significant advantages in publishing more papers or first-tier journal papers, but more corresponding author papers in the fields of Sciences; and (2) for the fields of Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences, returnees still have advantages in publishing more papers and more first-tier journal papers