INTERNATIONAL COLLABORATION - WILL IT BE KEEPING ALIVE EAST EUROPEAN RESEARCH

International scientific collaboration is very sensitive to political and economic changes in a country or a geopolitical region. Collaborat ion in research is reflected by die corresponding co-authorship of the published results which can be analysed with the help of bibliometric methods. Based on data from the Science Citation Index (SCI), the cha nge of annual international co-authorship patterns of Bulgaria, Czecho slovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania have been analysed for die perio ds 1981-1985 and 1984-1993, respectively. It is shown that internation al collaboration was not developing similarly in the countries under s tudy. Whilst scientific communities of Hungary and Poland have already been opening in the early 80s, the international collaboration of the other East-European countries was still dominated by COMECON relation s till 1989. As expected, since 1990 an increasing scientific collabor ation with highly developed countries can be observed in all five coun tries. At the same time, scientific collaboration with the former comm unist countries shows a clear decline. The great share of internationa l co-authorship links in some countries reflect various tendencies par t of which are interpreted with the help of a cardiologic model.