Publication output and collaboration of Central and Eastern European countries 1997-2016

The political, social and economic changes that emerged in the early 1990s enabled the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries to become more integrated into the European and global economy. The transition phase is seen as an important turning point in the development of science systems in the CEE countries, as science has freed itself from the indirect political and ideological control of the Soviet Union. The countries of the region quickly established intensive scientific collaboration with the leading countries of science, especially with the USA and Germany. Due to the economic development of the region over the last two decades, the changing patterns of collaboration between countries, and certain reforms of national science policies, authors have begun to publish articles in more prestigious journals, and the publication results and citation impacts of CEE countries have continuously increased. The overall characteristics of the science produced by the countries of the region are largely influenced by the countries in which the co-authors are located. In the case of the most productive countries with the greatest impact on citation (e.g. Austria, Hungary and Slovenia), the proportion of co-authors from the United States and Germany is above the regional average. Estonia - the country that has recently achieved the greatest citation impact - has established strong collaborations with Finland, one of the leading countries in international science. An examination of the relative strengths of international scientific collaboration between countries (calculated according to the Jaccard similarity index) shows that intraregional collaboration links have become even stronger than collaboration between CEE countries and countries outside the region. However, it is true that particularly powerful countries such as the United States and Germany act as transmitters in these links, and without their participation the intensity of collaboration between many CEE countries would be lower. A study of the relative strengths of international scientific collaboration highlights two facts: On the one hand, the accession of the post-communist CEE countries to the European Union has given more impetus to collaboration between them; on the other hand, after the initial separation efforts of some nations that were formerly part of a communist federal state, these now independent countries have strongly revived their scientific co-operative activities.