Nature: China becomes the main partner of Russian scientists instead of Westerners

The conflict in Ukraine led to a reorientation of Russian scientists from cooperation with Western colleagues to Indian and Chinese colleagues. Ukrainian scientists at the same time sharply reduced joint publications with Russians and increased with Poles, according to the study, conducted Nature magazine.

One of the consequences of the military conflict in Ukraine was the reduction of international collaborations in which Russian scientists participated and the problems of publishing their scientific articles in collaboration with foreign scientists. This led to the fact that in the publication of scientific articles by Russian scientists there are fewer and fewer co-authors from Western countries, while the proportion of co-authors from other countries began to increase.

To illustrate this trend, the editors of the journal Nature analyzed the statistics of collaborative publications indexed in the Scopus abstract database in 2022.

The analysis showed that by the end of 2022, the share of participation of colleagues from the United States and Germany in articles by Russian authors fell sharply, while the percentage of co-authors from Chinese scientists and Indians increased. The study authors note that the true extent of the trend may not be revealed until late 2023, as many papers published in 2022 were submitted by February 24.

Similar to 2021, in 2022 only a quarter of peer-reviewed publications by Russian scientists were co-authored with foreign colleagues. “Today, China is poised to replace the United States and Germany as Russia’s top research partner, with India in seventh place. Among the 25 countries that cooperate the most with Russia, the only states that also increased their share of co-sponsorship in 2022 are Kazakhstan and Iran,” the study said.

According to Caroline Wagner, an expert at Ohio State University, in recent years Chinese scientists have increased their co-author share in the publications of scientists from many countries except the United States. “It does not appear that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has interrupted cooperation between Russia and China,” she said.

“In Ukraine, meanwhile, the share of papers with Russian co-authors in 2022 fell sharply, and Poland became the country’s main research partner,” the article said.

Earlier, Fedor Ratnikov, a member of the LHCb collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider, told RTVI how the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) decided to deal with joint publications with Russian scientists and the difficulties faced by Russian participants. to cooperation.