Figure 14: Ukraine's publications, international co-publications and

EU28/AC co-publications (Source = WoS+Scopus)

 

122 As the Ukrainian statistics do not use FTE (full time equivalents) it is difficult to provide a correct figure of decline.

 

period 2003 to 2013. Of these 94,135 publications 31,695 publications involve at least one author affiliated in Ukraine and one author affiliated in another country. Consequently, the share of international co-publications in Ukraine’s overall publication output is 33.46%, which is comparatively low.

 

In 21,378 of Ukraine’s co-publications published in the observed time span, at least one EU28/AC author is involved: Therefore, around 22.6% of Ukraine’s overall publications and 67.45% of all Ukraine’s international co-publications are published with an author affiliated in an EU28/AC country (see Figure 14).

 

Ukraine's annual output of co-publications is growing slightly faster (around 55% more co-publications in 2013 [3,549 co-publications] than in 2003 [2,279 co-publications]) than of Ukraine-EU28/AC co-publications (around 53% more co-publications in 2013 [2,394 co-publications] than in 2003 [1,563 co-publications]), which are in turn growing faster than the annual output of Ukraine's overall publications (around 44% more publications in 2013 [10,440 publications] than in 2003 [7,257 publications]).

 

In Figure 15 the annual output of 2003 is taken as the benchmark for the following years, indicating 100% as the initial value. Whereas until 2009 there have been sometimes slight drops in the annual output from one year to another, from 2009 onwards the numbers of (co-)publications experienced a steady rise (see Annex 1 for the complete list of absolute numbers of Ukrainian (co-)publications).

 

Although the observable increase of Ukraine's (co-)publications follows a global trend, globally the annual scientific output in 2013 nearly doubled compared to the output in 2003 (around 84% more publications worldwide in 2013 than in 2003 [Source: Scopus]) and thus is growing faster than for Ukraine. This means that the internationalisation speed of Ukraine remains below the global average, but it needs to be taken into account that the overall R&D personnel in Ukraine significantly decreased in this period.

 

 

Figure 15: Growth rates over time of Ukrainian publications, co-publications and EU28/AC co-publications, 2003-2013 (Source = WoS+Scopus)

 

Ukraine's partner countries, which are mostly involved in Ukraine’s co-publications, are highlighted in Figure 16. Out of these twenty partner countries, thirteen are countries from EU28/AC. Germany, followed closely by Russia and the USA, is the country with most co-publications with Ukrainian authors. Ukraine's co-publications involving authors from Italy, Spain, Switzerland, South Korea, the Czech Republic, Austria, Belgium, Mexico, China or Finland have more than 350 different authors involved on average. This indicates that for those partner countries big science collaborations, e.g. Physics & Astronomy, might be the main link. Ukraine's co-publications involving authors from Japan or Sweden do involve only slightly more than 80 authors on average (see Annex 2).

 

 

Figure 16: 20 most involved partner countries in Ukraine's international co-publications, 2003-2013 (Source = WoS+Scopus)

 

 

Figure 17 shows the Salton's Measure for Ukraine and the main EU28/AC co-publication partners of Ukraine. For its calculateion we have used data on overall publication output for the EU28/AC countries from the SCImagoJR database as we do not have the unified data for all of these countries overall publications. For Ukraine, the unified data for overall publications and for the co-publications were used.

 

Figure 17: Salton's Measure for the most active Ukraine-EU28/AC co-publication country pairs, 2003-2013 (Source = WoS+Scopus; ScimagoJR)

 

 

The analysis shows that relations between Ukraine and Poland, Germany, France and the Czech Republic are quite strong (Salton's Measure over 1%). The co-publication relations between Ukraine and Austria, Italy and UK also amount to a significant share of their overall research output (Salton's Measure over 0.8%).

 

The results of a co-publication analysis in terms of thematic areas depend much on the definition of these specific areas. For this study we used the Science Metrix Classification of Science, a three-level journal subject classification system. It builds on comprehensive work on standardisation and classification of journals, partly financed by the European Commission. The main difference between the

 

Science Metrix Ontology and classification systems used by Scopus and Web of Science is the disjunctive classification, i.e. each journal is attributed to one (not one or more) subject category.

 

Table 6 shows the Science Metrix domains (column 1), with the publication output by Ukraine-based authors, including all citable article and article-like publications from 2003 to 2013 in the second column, Ukraine’s international co-publications (column 4) and all Ukraine-EU28/AC co-publications in column 6. Additionally, the share of each Science Metrix domain of the overall Ukrainian publication output (column 3), of the Ukrainian international co-publication output (column 5) and of the Ukrainian-EU28/AC co-publication output (column 7) is given.

 

Natural Science is the major research domain for Ukrainian publications, especially for Ukrainian-EU28/AC co-publications; 66.34% of all Ukrainian-EU28/AC co-publications fall under this research domain. The share of the research domains Applied Sciences, Health Sciences and Economic & Social Sciences is highest for the overall Ukrainian publications. In those research domains international co-publications are – slightly in the case of Health Sciences – less relevant.

 

Science Metrix	UA	Share	UA int. co-	Share	UA-EU28/AC	Share
domain	publications		publications		co-publications
Natural Sciences	45,131	48.25	20,099	63.67	14,085	66.34
		%		%		%
Applied Sciences	34,775	37.18	7,321	23.19	4,465	21.03
		%		%		%
Health Sciences	10,119	10.82	3,340	10.58	2,173	10.23
		%		%		%
Economic & Social	2,583	2.76%		0.80%		0.86%
Sciences
Arts & Humanities		0.53%		0.73%		0.78%
General		0.45%		1.02%		0.75%

 

Table 6: Science Metrix domains of Ukrainian (co-)publications, 2003-2013 (Source = WoS+Scopus)

 

Ukraine has in particular a strong link with co-publication partner countries in the EU28/AC in the scientific area of Physics & Astronomy. Whereas 28.6% of all Ukrainian publications are published in the field Physics & Astronomy, 42.02% of all Ukrainian international co-publications fall under this research area and 44.43% of all Ukrainian – EU28/AC co-publications are published in this field. Compared to many other countries¹²³, this share of Physics & Astronomy in Ukrainian (co-)publications is particularly high.

 

Second most Ukrainian publications are in the field of Enabling & Strategic Technologies (15.86%).In this field, however, the share of international co-publications with EU28/AC is comparatively low (only 5.16%) aluthough the general share of international co-publication in this field amounts to 12.75% (see Figure 18). This indicates that research in the field of Enabling & Strategic Technologies was rather conducted with other countries (probably Russia) than with the EU.

 

Chemistry is the field with the second highest EU28/AC co-publication share of 10.74%%. Chemistry, ranks fifth in the overall Ukrainian publication count (9.58%) (see Figure 18).

 

 

123 E.g. the share of Physics & Astronomy in international co-publications of countries within the Danube Region is considerably slower; e.g. for Austria the share is 13.08%, for Bulgaria 25.67%, Czech Republic 20.79%, Hungary 18.18%, Romania 22.98% or for Slovakia 22.74%. Smaller countries have even to some extent lower shares e.g. Albania has a share of 3.46%, Bosnia and Herzegovina has a share of 6.24%. (cf. Lampert et al. (2015)) This is also true for many other countries.

 

 

 

 

Figure 18: most important Science Metrix fields in Ukraine's (co-)publications, 2003-2013 (Source = WoS+Scopus)

 

The annual output of UA-EU28/AC co-publications in Information & Communication Technologies is growing particularly strong: the output in 2013 is more than five times as high as in 2003. Growth in Economics & Business was even higher, i.e. the output grew tenfold in the same period. In Clinical Medicine, Biology, Engineering, and Mathematics & Statistics, the annual output roughly doubled from 2003 to 2013. For most of the other research fields, the annual growth of UA-EU28/AC co-publications is steady but rather low with yearly deviations and might be too low to be measured on a yearly basis (see Annex 3).