Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Scholarly and scientific research is a cross-border activity that exists within political, social and historical contexts.  National and multi-national scientific agencies create and endorse policies intended to support collaborative research initiatives, develop research infrastructure and promote scientific cooperation between countries.   This cooperation can be thought to be independent of political or social conditions, but prolonged conflict such as civil war can affect the capacity of a national scientific system to engage in productive research and international collaboration.  The public policy community would benefit from additional tools for monitoring scientific cooperation, research infrastructure and collaboration in conflict zones.  In an early application of bibliometrics to the question of how national conflict could impact scientific productivity and collaboration, de Bruin and colleagues (1991) analyzed trans-national collaborations in the Gulf region in the decade leading up to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.  The authors demonstrated that trends in bibliometric data from the region related to trends in the political environment in the region, concluding their analysis with a recommendation of the use of bibliometrics as a complementary methodology when studying areas of tension and conflict. 

            In this research paper, I extend the use of bibliometric and scientometric measures in studying the impacts of regional conflict on national scientific systems. First, I incorporate the country of the reprint/corresponding author from publications in Web of Science Core Collection in collaboration analyses.  This enhancement provides more granularity when studying the relationship between countries within conflict zones and international partners in terms of who is leading the research collaboration.  Second, I use the funding acknowledgement metadata available since 2008 to investigate changes in funding source as a proxy for the impact of conflict on national research infrastructure.  Studying trends in funding acknowledgements could point to interventions needed to support and sustain scientific infrastructure.  Finally, I use data from the Data Citation Index (part of the Web of Science Core Collection) to analyze published research datasets in the social sciences, physical sciences, life sciences, and humanities as an additional indicator of the impact of conflict on scientific infrastructure and international cooperation.  The continued production of datasets in conflict zones may reveal scientific projects and initiatives that are sufficiently robust to persist despite the challenging social and political conditions.  Taken together this additional information about scientific collaboration and infrastructure in conflict zones can provide additional tools for the development of public policy intended to sustain the scientific enterprise through periods of tension and conflict.

References:

De Bruin, R, et al (1991). Bibliometric lines in the sand. Nature, 349:559-562.