The growth of international collaboration in East European scholarly communities: a bibliometric analysis of journal articles published between 1989 and 2009

In the last two decades international collaboration in the Eastern European academic communities has strongly intensified. Scientists from developed countries within the European Union play a key role in stimulating the international collaboration of academics in this region. In addition, many of the research projects that engage East-European scholars are only possible in the framework of the large European programmes. The present study focuses on the role of EU and other developed nations as a partner of these countries and the analysis of the performance of collaborative research as reflected by the citation impact of internationally co-authored publications.