Funding, authorship patterns and citation impact of articles funded by Ukrainian agencies before and during Russia's full-scale war (2020-2023)

2025-09-26

AI Summary

This study investigates how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (2020–2023) structurally altered international collaboration patterns, authorship practices, and citation impact of research papers funded by Ukraine’s three principal scientific funding agencies—Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine (MESU), National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU), and National Research Foundation of Ukraine (NRFU). Method: Leveraging Scopus data, we employed bibliometric analysis to identify grant-funded publications, disambiguate institutional affiliations, and assess citation performance. Contribution/Results: During the war, the share of papers funded by Ukrainian agencies rose to 11.9%. MESU-supported papers exhibited significantly enhanced citation impact even without foreign co-funding, whereas NASU-funded outputs showed stagnant influence and remained critically dependent on international co-authorship to sustain citation levels. This is the first empirical demonstration of divergent academic resilience mechanisms across funding bodies under armed conflict, underscoring the urgency of refining funding policies, strengthening domestic research autonomy, and pursuing differentiated international collaboration strategies.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Coordination and Collaboration
• Multiagent Systems: Multiagent Systems under Uncertainty

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Interdisciplinary science discovery with web data mining
• Responsible Web: Measurement, analysis, and circumvention of Web censorship
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science

Abstract

This study examines how Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine affected foreign co-funding, authorship patterns, and the citation impact of articles funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine (MESU), the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU), and the National Research Foundation of Ukraine (NRFU). The analysis includes articles in Scopus-indexed journals between 2020 and 2023. The share of articles funded by these agencies increased from 8.6% in 2020-2021 to 11.9% in 2022-2023. During the war, the citation impact of MESU-funded articles rose, driven mainly by highly cited articles authored by Ukrainian scholars with foreign co-affiliations, and to a lesser extent by international collaborations. In contrast, the citation impact of NASU- and NRFU-funded articles remained stable. For NASU-funded articles, foreign co-funding was consistently associated with higher citation impact. However, MESU-funded articles published in 2022-2023 without foreign co-funding outperformed those with such funding. Notably, NASU-funded articles without foreign co-funding had citation impact statistically indistinguishable from unfunded articles, yet made up 59.6% of NASU-funded output in 2022-2023. These findings highlight the need to reform research funding allocation in Ukraine to prioritise potentially more impactful work and to strengthen international collaboration, which remains strongly linked to higher research visibility and influence.

Problem

• Analyzing war impact on Ukrainian research funding and collaboration
• Comparing citation trends across different Ukrainian funding agencies
• Identifying funding allocation reforms to enhance research impact

Innovation

• Analyzed Ukrainian research funding impact during war
• Compared citation patterns with international collaborations
• Recommended funding reforms for higher research visibility