International scientific collaboration of post-Soviet countries: a bibliometric analysis

One of the major characteristics of research is the role and scope of international collaboration. Patterns of such collaboration are often complex and determined not only by pure academic rationale, but also by political, economic, geographic and cultural factors. The post-Soviet region has several features, which make it a unique unit for analysis of scientific collaboration. Based on bibliometric data for the period 1993–2018 with a 5-year lag, we analyze how international collaboration patterns of post-Soviet countries changed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Our results show that in the observed period post-Soviet countries significantly changed their patterns of international collaboration, and these changes are country-specific. The analyzed countries moved away from each other, choosing their own international collaboration strategy. We observe a dramatic decrease in scientific collaboration between post-Soviet countries and a significant growth of collaboration with Western countries. With that, the role of post-Soviet countries in international collaboration declined rapidly for many countries.