Russian research ‘increasingly isolated’ amid Ukraine war

Russia’s war in Ukraine has triggered a collapse in its international research collaborations, as data shows that China has become the main partner of the country’s increasingly isolated scientific community.

In 2021, 10.1 per cent of Russia’s total research output was conducted in collaboration with the US, and 10 per cent with Germany – its two largest partners at the time.

But this had fallen to just 6.7 per cent and 5.4 per cent, respectively, by 2023, while it also saw a decrease in output produced alongside the UK, Italy, France and many others, figures from Clarivate’s annual G20 scorecard show.

In contrast, the figures, compiled by analysts and data scientists at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), show that Russian collaborations with China rose from 7.1 per cent in 2021 to 7.7 per cent in 2022.

Although this dipped to 7.4 per cent in 2023, it means that China has overtaken the US and Germany to become Russia’s leading research partner.

Despite diplomatic pressure in the West, China has been “perfectly happy to collaborate with Russia”, and India’s collaborations have remained relatively flat, said Gordon Rogers, senior manager of data science at Clarivate.

He told Times Higher Education that the data shows a decline among all of Russia’s other biggest collaborators since the war, meaning the country is producing much less international research and reflecting a “generally poor performance from an academic perspective”.

“It’s isolating their research base, so they are interacting less with the rest of the world,” he added.

“Two-thirds of their output now is domestic, and that trend is pulling down the overall impact of their research over time, that’s making their research less accessible, less attention is being made to it, so obviously they’re going more isolationist.”

Andrey Kalinichev, research director at IMT Atlantique, a French technological university, said the “growing isolation of Russian science” has greatly intensified since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but collaborations with all Western countries have been steadily declining since at least 2005.

Dr Kalinichev said the figures also come against a background of more researchers being wrongfully detained and imprisoned for disclosing state secrets simply for their collaborations with the West – a practice that has been in use for the past 25 years but has accelerated since the war.

He said that the Russian research ecosystem has a lot of experience dealing with this kind of isolation from the Soviet era, and that Vladimir Putin and many academic bosses in the country are “great believers in the benefits of scientific and industrial espionage”.

“As for Western know-how, I believe it will continue to trickle down into Russia in ‘second-hand’ [form] via collaborations with Chinese scientists,” he added.

Dr Kalinichev said he did not expect to see much damage to global research overall as a result of “self-imposed Russian isolation”. “However, the losses and harm to some individual researchers can be, indeed, irreparable, both for some Russian scientists and for their collaborating Western partners,” he added.

Daniel Hook, chief executive of Digital Science, said his firm’s analysis also shows that the US, the UK, France and Germany are collaborating less with Russia, and although China is now its biggest partner, the number of projects has remained static.

These figures show that Chinese output with Russia rose from 0.2 per cent in 2010 to 0.5 per cent in 2020, but this has since fallen to 0.4 per cent.

“Thus, it is not only researchers in Europe and the US that are decoupling from Russia, it is Chinese collaboration also, although to a lesser extent.”

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com