Scientific collaboration between EU and
Economies in Transition:
A bibliometric trend analysis of the nineties
by Hans-Jürgen Czerwon
RASCI e.V.
Bruno-Apitz-Str. 1, D-13125 Berlin, F.R. Germany
Abstract
There are no longer political or other formal barriers
for Central and East European Countries (CEEC) to co-operate with western
countries. As a consequence publication activity of most Economies in
Transition (EIT), as registered in the Science Citation Index (SCI), and
also co-authorships with Western scientists have increased considerably
since 1990 (e.g. /1-5/). In the present follow-up study we have analysed
both the publication performance of European EIT countries and their co-authorship
patterns with EU on the whole and with selected EU member states for the
period 1990-1999. Four country groups were analysed in more detail:
- Six Central and South East European Countries (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria)
- Baltic States (Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia)
- Four European CIS (Commonwealth of the Independent States) Countries (USSR/Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova)
- Former Yugoslavia (Croatia, Slovenia, F.R. Yugoslavia).
Papers recorded in the 1990-1999 volumes of the SCI (edited by the Institute
for Scientific Information, ISI, Philadelphia, PA, USA) in the narrower
sense as 'citable publications' (articles, letters, notes, reviews) were
taken into consideration. The so-called full-counting scheme was used
in counting publications of countries or regions, i.e., a full count was
recorded whenever a corporate address from a country occurred in the address
field of the publication.
The main findings of our study are the following:
There are significantly different tendencies concerning the collaboration patterns in the countries under consideration. At the close of the last decade countries in groups 1 and 2 published nearly 30-40% of all papers indexed in the SCI in collaboration with scientists from the 15 EU countries. In contrast, this share lay at only 15-30% in the four European CIS countries and the former Yugoslavian states. A group of advanced countries in which the institutional transformation of S&T systems have made considerable progress (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia and Slovenia) is characterised by a continuous increase of publication output in the nineties and intensive collaboration with EU members. (Germany is in most cases the main partner of these countries.)
Since the mid-1990s the number of publications in international core
journals has dropped again in the four European CIS countries or has stagnated
in Bulgaria and Slovakia - while at the same time the number of publications
co-authored together with scientists from EU countries has continued to
rise: This can be considered an indication of the fact that the lack of
domestic resources for R&D in these countries has already begun to
have an impact on their scientific output.
Moreover, the collaboration patterns of the Baltic states as well as Croatia,
Slovenia, Moldova and other small-sized countries reflect the fact that
the smaller the size of a country's scientific and technical community
the more likely it is that researchers will find less potential collaborators
within their country and therefore will have to look overseas for research
partners.
The quantitative results of the study clearly show the ever growing importance of the EU as scientific collaboration partner of EIT countries, especially of potential future EU members. A comparison of collaboration patterns between EIT countries and EU on the one hand and EIT countries and USA and Japan on the other hand was made.
References
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