# Universal and specific features of Ukrainian economic research: publication
analysis based on Crossref data††thanks: This work was supported in part by
the National Research Foundation of Ukraine, project No. 2020.01/0338.

O. Mryglod1 S. Nazarovets2 S. Kozmenko3

(February 24, 2021)

###### Abstract

Our study is one of the first examples of multidimensional and longitudinal
disciplinary analysis at the national level based on Crossref data. We present
a large-scale quantitative analysis of Ukrainian economics. This study is not
yet another example of research aimed at ranking of local journals, authors or
institutions, but rather exploring general tendencies that can be compared to
other countries or regions. We study different aspects of Ukrainian economics
output. In particular, the collaborative nature, geographic landscape and some
peculiarities of citation statistics are investigated. We have found that
Ukrainian economics is characterized by a comparably small share of co-
authored publications, however, it demonstrates the tendency towards more
collaborative output. Based on our analysis, we discuss specific and universal
features of Ukrainian economic research. The importance of supporting various
initiatives aimed at enriching open scholarly metadata is considered. A
comprehensive and high-quality meta description of publications is probably
the shortest path to a better understanding of national trends, especially for
non-English speaking countries. The results of our analysis can be used to
better understand Ukrainian economic research and support research policy
decisions.

1 Institute for Condensed Matter Physics of the National Academy of Sciences
of Ukraine, 1 Svientsitskii St., 79011 Lviv, Ukraine

2 State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine, 180 Antonovycha Str.,
03680 Kyiv, Ukraine

3 University of Social Sciences Spoleczna Akademia Nauk, 9 Sienkiewicza St.,
90–113 Łódź, Poland

This is the version of the Article before peer-review has taken place. The
paper is submitted to Scientometrics journal

##  1 Introduction

Research process is a complex system that includes human natural activity,
uncertainty of creative process, non-trivial patterns of collaborative
structures and many other aspects, which makes any unambiguous formalization
impossible. Therefore, both for countries with established economies and
“healthy” research ecosystems and for developing countries that are just
initiating required reforms, there are no universal and simple approaches to
research evaluation. Assessment of research outputs, which are mainly
reflected in the form of scholarly publications, is a widely accepted way of
evaluating the efficiency of the research process itself. However, it is far
from being simple to combine expert judgements and quantitative methods.
Moreover, any implemented decision causes the immediate and obvious or remote
and hidden reaction of the entire system and its further adaptation.
Sometimes, the change is rather natural. For example, social sciences and
humanities (SSH), where output is traditionally more diverse in terms of
language, publication types, etc., demonstrate the tendency to increase the
share of journal papers and English-language publications [1]. Sometimes, such
adaptation is expressed in a completely unexpected way. The haphazard
application or even misuse of quantitative metrics can lead to the resistance
of researchers and even publishers. The absence of editions in official
registers or authoritative abstract databases can be represented even in a
positive sense, as an indication of some particularity. The problem is that
such a nonconformity of periodicals is usually accompanied by invisibility:
ISSN for journals, DOI for papers, ORCID for authors, a web-page with all
necessary information available, and other formal elements make particular
edition an element of the entire system. The more data are available, the more
comprehensive analysis can be performed in order to understand the typical
features of scientific disciplines and the role of the considered journal, to
follow the evolution of knowledge structure, to map the national or, more
globally, world science.

Today, we are witnessing the deep crisis of Ukrainian scientific research
system: permanent under-funding, outdated management methods, weak integration
in the world information space and many other problems form the vicious circle
[2, 3]. We believe that the situation cannot be improved without a clear
understanding of the current state of national research. Unfortunately, only
the fragments of relevant information can be found from various sources. Some
disciplines that are related to “hard” sciences are traditionally better
“visible” as they are better covered by Scopus and Web of Sciences (WoS). Such
disciplines also tend to be more willing to follow new rules of the game, such
as maintaining web-pages, publishing preprints, assigning DOI, etc. For
example, the analysis of openness of Ukrainian academic journals [4] revealed
that the “most visible” SSH section is History, Philosophy and Law. But only
25% of its publications on average were fully available online. The
corresponding value for the Physics and Astronomy section was almost 45%; for
the Chemistry section — almost 35%, and for Mathematics — 32%. The large-scale
quantitative analysis of SSH often cannot be done due to the lack of available
data. But new possibilities appear with the development of new information
tools. The scientific research system is gradually adapting to the challenges
of new times.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a quantitative description of the
Ukrainian journal papers in the field of Economics using Crossref data.
Ukrainian economic discipline is chosen as a case study for many reasons.
Ukrainian research is understudied in general, and there are no examples of a
quantitative scientometric study at the national level so far. The results of
such analysis can be used in practice to better understand the selected area
of Ukrainian research, develop benchmarks necessary to use metrics and support
research policy decisions. Such a case study will make Ukraine more visible on
the world map providing the description of another Eastern European developing
country with features such as Cyrillic writing and non-English speaking.

Economics is chosen as a representative of SSH, which is considered “as the
bridge between the ‘hard’ sciences and the ‘social’ sciences” [5]. To quote a
very nice formulation in [6], this paper is aimed at accumulating the
“evidence-based assessment” of publishing behavior in Ukrainian economics.

The paper is organized as follows: some relevant peculiarities of Ukrainian
research policy and Ukrainian economic research are discussed in the next
section. The data set used in our case study is described in section 3. A
brief discussion is given in section 4 along with a comparative analysis
performed at the publication level for each of the obtained results. General
conclusions are drawn in section 5.

##  2 Research in Ukraine. Ukrainian economic research

Economics is a popular discipline for education and research in Ukraine. It is
in the TOP3 list of disciplines (the only from SSH range) by the number of
doctoral theses defended during 2018–2020 in Ukraine according to the
statistics of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine [7]. This
automatically means that a large number of journal papers are published: the
necessary minimum to get a doctoral degree is officially determined [8].
Publications also form the basis for many other aspects of research
evaluation. Therefore, the publishing behaviour is both consciously and
unconsciously governed by the external rules. To take this into account for
further interpretations, the main peculiarities of the latter have to be
discussed.

Over 2.5 thousand of titles are listed on the web portal “Scientific
Periodicals of Ukraine” managed by Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine. Most
of these journals publish papers exclusively in Ukrainian; they are not
indexed in important international abstracting and indexing databases.
Therefore, one can assume that these numerous journals disseminate scientific
information mainly at the regional level, reaching only limited audience [9]
and performing their special functions [10]. 1,276 editions are officially
recognized (the most covered SSH disciplines in this context are Economics
with 227 relevant journals and Law with 98)111in January 2021: the official
List of scientific professional editions of Ukraine is regularly updated. Only
papers in these Ukrainian journals are taken into account in many assessment
procedures. The rules for recognizing publications in foreign sources were
different in different time periods.

It is interesting to note that due to illiterately formulated requirements,
all publications in foreign journals were automatically treated as appropriate
independently on their quality during a long time. Moreover, the analysis of
the Ukrainian policies between 2012 and 2018 (e.g., [11, 12]) reveals the
implicit stimulus to formal publishing in foreign journals, but no criteria to
select such journals were provided. Therefore, one can speculate about
numerous papers in low-quality and “invisible” journals published abroad.
Since then, many changes were adapted to encourage publishing in journals
indexed in Scopus and WoS databases [11]. However, the share of papers by
Ukrainian authors indexed in these databases is still small. Interestingly,
the majority of such publications can be found again in national journals
[13], in spite of the bias towards these editions (see also [6]). To give an
example, according to WoS data, over 60% of all economic papers where Ukraine
is mentioned in the affiliations are published in Ukrainian journals; and this
share is greater in Scopus (70%)222data assessed in January 2021.

##  3 The Data

Before describing the data set in our case study, some _limitations_ have to
be mentioned. (i) First of all, only journal papers are taken into account.
While presenting results in a form of books is significant for Economics,
journal papers can still be considered as the dominant type of output. It is
found that two-thirds of publications in the social sciences consist of
journal papers [9]. Moreover, book metadata are hardly available and,
therefore, cannot currently be used for analysis. Ukrainian information
services provide only limited portions of bibliographic information: non-
structured and published with large time delay, it can be used only to draw
general retrospectives. Book metadata can be found in the Ukrainian abstract
database _“Ukrainika Naukova”_ [14]. However, no export of structured metadata
is available, and the database is out of date. Also, the annual list of all
journal articles and monographs within different research disciplines are
prepared by the _“Ukrainian book chamber”_ service [15]: the so-called
_litopysy_ (chronicles) contain bibliographic records. However, digital
versions of these unstructured lists are published once a year with a two-year
delay. According to the data on Ukrainian economic research retrieved from
these two sources, statistics of journal papers are about twice as large.

(ii) Only _papers in the journals published in Ukraine_ are included in the
main data set. Theoretically, to cover all outputs of Ukrainian economic
research, it is necessary to consider papers by Ukrainian authors in both
national and foreign editions. But althought there is a possibility to cover
many of Ukrainian journals (see below), it is hard to collect necessary
metadata for the papers published in journals of other countries, which are
outside the internationally recognized abstract data bases. However, Scopus
data related to economic publications by Ukrainian authors in both national
and foreign journals are partially used for particular tasks of research.

The _Crossref_ (https://crossref.org) is used as a source of scholarly
metadata in this study. Starting from 2018 [12], the assignment of DOI to each
publication is one of the requirements for Ukrainian journals to be included
into the national List. This means that relevant structured metadata are
delivered to Crossref systematically. Moreover, many leading Ukrainian
publishers actively support the Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC;
https://i4oc.org), and more than 500 million references are now openly
available through the Crossref API [16]. Although Crossref avoids creating any
metrics or special analytics, other toolmakers actively use this open citation
metadata in their services (e.g., Dimensions, Lens.org, or COCI) [17]. The
developers of the Open Ukrainian Citation Index (OUCI;
https://ouci.dntb.gov.ua/en/), a search engine and a citation database that
uses open Crossref data, also followed this path. The OUCI interface includes
search filters, special for Ukrainian publication data. Moreover, additional
journal information is taken into account: e.g., categories defined by
Ukrainian policy or specialties according to the classification recognized by
the State Attestation Commission of Ukraine. In addition to the mission to
provide simple and contextual search of Ukrainian scholarly data, the OUCI is
aimed at attracting publishers’ attention to the problem of completeness and
openness of the scholarly metadata [18]. Crossref classifies documents into
broad disciplines [19], but most documents of our data set were not marked
according to this classification. Thus, the OUCI provides an unprecedented
opportunity for Ukrainian data (only at the journal level).

According to OUCI, over 300 thousand of papers in over 1,550 Ukrainian
editions (367 publishers) are indexed in Crossref333February 2021. And this
statistics is exponentially increasing. Therefore, OUCI interface allows one
to collect comparably large statistics on journal publication metadata related
to Ukrainian publishers. The usefulness of OUCI is demonstrated in Figure 1:
the annual numbers of economic journal papers by Ukrainian authors obtained
from different data sources can be compared. It is worth noting that
disciplinary labeling is performed differently in each case — this is one of
the possible reasons for different statistics. A journal-level classification
is used in the case of OUCI: specialities are manually defined by OUCI staff
following the description of the “Aims and Scope” section on journals’ web-
pages. The obvious drawback here is the inability to separate purely economic
papers published in multidisciplinary journals.

Figure 1: The annual numbers of paper records related to Ukrainian Economics
retrieved from different sources (August 2020): Book Chamber service
(disciplinary catalogs are available); Ukrainika Naukova database (internal
topical classification indices assigned to papers are used for search); Scopus
database (Search phrase: “AFFILCOUNTRY ( UKRAINE ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( SUBJAREA ,
“BUSI” ) OR LIMIT-TO ( SUBJAREA , “ECON” ) )”; OUCI (journal specialties
include “Economics (code 051)”).

The State Attestation Commission of Ukraine defines Economics discipline
through a number of specialties. Accordingly, the OUCI search was narrowed to
the following ones: Economics; Tax and Accounting Policy; Finance, Banking and
Insurance; Management; Marketing; Business, Entrepreneurship and Stock
Markets; Public Administration; and International Economic Relations. In
addition, only journals from the National List are considered. 56,301 records
were retrieved in December 2020. However, some journals are attributed to many
specialties being multidisciplinary. Preliminary analysis and manual
inspection of initial data set showed that the topics of many papers are too
far from Economics. To end up with the most relevant and representative
journals, additional filtering was applied. One of the following conditions is
expected to be satisfied: (i) journal specialties are limited by the list
mentioned above; (ii) only four journal disciplines (upper classification
level) — “Social and Behavioral Sciences”, “Management and Administration”,
“Public Management and Administration” and “International Relations” — are
exclusively taken into account. The final data set includes 23,964 publication
records related to 123 Ukrainian journals. Publications period is limited to
2002–2020 years.

##  4 Results

_Publication statistics._ The annual number of publications in our data set
rapidly increases after 2012: while only 69 papers per year on average are
found for the period 2002–2012, the same value for 2013–2020 already exceeds
2,900. Therefore, the latter data subset is considered in the cases when
annual effects are investigated.

_Size of co-authorship teams._ A typical Ukrainian economic paper is written
by one (almost 50% of publications) or two (30%) authors. The largest
collaboration team consists of 12 authors. The well-known tendency towards
more collaborative economic research (e.g., see [20, 21, 22, 23, 24]) can be
observed for Ukrainian data. Following the definitions in [23], an increase in
the incidence of co-authorship and in the extent of co-authorship can be
observed (see Figure 2). Not only the noticeable increase of annual _share of
collaborative papers_ is observed since 2014, but the sizes of co-authorship
teams also increase. Moreover, some effects are even more remarkable for
Ukrainian data compared to others. To give an example, doubling of shares of
publications by three, four or more authors during $\approx 15$ years
(1996–2015) is stated in [24], but this share for Ukrainian data increased
from $16.8\%$ to $23.8\%$ (over 1.4 times greater) during only 5 years
(2016–2020).

Figure 2: The annual shares of Ukrainian economic papers categorized by the
sizes of co-authorship teams, i.e. consisting of 1, 2, 3 or at least 4
authors. The corresponding average numbers of authors per paper are indicated
by black symbols.

However, while general trends are similar, the particular characteristics of
Ukrainian data can be found. For example, while 70–80% of collaborative papers
in Economics in 2010–2014 were reported [24, 25] for other data sets, the
highest mark reached for Ukrainian data during 2017–2020 is about 52.5%.
According to other results, late 1990s is the latest period when the share of
economic solo-publications was found to be at least 50% (see Figure 3 (a)).
The typical trend is partially reproduced for Ukrainian economic research only
if its data are manually shifted back along the timeline. Similar situation is
found for the _average number of co-authors per one publication_. The gradual
growth of this value is observed: it was close to 1 before 1950, 1.5–1.7 in
1990s [23, 22, 26], and 1.9 in 2000s [22, 25, 26]. After 2010, economic
publications are found to be written by two authors on average [25, 27]. The
corresponding value for Ukrainian data is almost 1.8, which again is typical
for late 1990s.

(a)

(b)

Figure 3: The annual shares of co-authored economic publications for different
data sets: geometric symbols [the shapes are the same for (a) and (b)] denote
data points taken from texts or digitized plots (WebPlotDigitizer is used,
[28]) in [20, 21, 23, 29, 22, 25, 24]. The data for Ukrainian economic
research are shown by diamons: (a) solid for the entire set of real Crossref
data and open for manually shifted ones; (b) solid for real Crossref data
excluding the publications indexed also in Scopus or WoS and crossed for
Scopus data.

Different data sources and, thus, different disciplinary classifications are
used to obtain trends depicted in Figure 3 (a). Previously published results
concern the data related to top journals and, presumably, to output coming
from “advanced” countries (the dominant contribution is typically made by the
authors from the US, see [29]). On the contrary, almost 87% of publications in
our data set are not indexed in Scopus or WoS databases. Another difference is
that other studies [20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 24, 29] are often centered on the top
economic journals rather than on the data related to a particular country. The
exception is [25], where the search was performed by authors’ affiliation
country (Denmark) — the corresponding imaginary slope for resulting data is
the most similar to the one for Ukrainian data (Figure 3 (a)).

It is curious to speculate about the reasons for such “delayed” trends
observed for Ukrainian economic research. The underlying mechanisms that
govern co-authorship are discussed in many papers. There is no need to repeat
everything here, we will only mention just some of them [21, 23, 22, 30].
Firstly, an increase in specialization and complexity of the Economics
discipline itself implies the need to combine professional skills of scholars.
Secondly, the increased use of quantitative approaches makes it easier to
divide work tasks. In addition, “the great overlap between quantitative
methods and empirical articles” is declared in [25]. Positive correlations
between international collaboration and the probability to get published in
top journals are also discussed [25, 24]. Therefore, one can suggest the
dominance of theoretical studies and the prevalence of qualitative approaches
in Ukrainian economic research. However, it is not obvious whether such a
conclusion can be drawn for the entire Ukrainian economic research or only for
part of it (large in our case). To our knowledge, there is a lack of analysis
of economic publications not indexed in Scopus or WoS for other countries [1].

To be able to use the Ukrainian data for more accurate comparison, additional
search for internationally visible publication data was performed. 8,215
records are collected from Scopus in January 2021 using the following search
request: (SUBJAREA (BUSI) OR SUBJAREA (ECON) AFFILCOUNTRY (UKRAINE)) AND
(LIMIT-TO (SRCTYPE, “J”)). It can be seen in Figure 3 (b) (publications
indexed in Scopus or WoS are excluded from the Crossref data set to make this
particular subfigure) that although Ukrainian Economics became visible in
Scopus later, it demonstrates surprisingly rapid growth in collaborativeness,
approaching 95%.

Thus, two current characteristic ratios of collaborative publications are
observed for Ukrainian economic research. The higher share of co-authored
papers in the journals indexed in Scopus corresponds to current world trends.
The lower share of co-authored outputs is found for journals invisible in
Scopus and WoS databases. One can speculate about the specialization and
disciplinary fragmentation of economic research [25, 31] supposing that some
of topics are more locally nested and, therefore, are targeted at particular
audience, while others are more requested on the international level. For
example, such a diversification of topics depending on journals’ venues is
mentioned in [32] (p. 16). If this is the case for Ukraine, one can also
suppose that the topics of international interest are more related to
quantitative methods and experimental research. Having no comprehensive
evidence for different countries, it is hard to say if such situation is
typical for economic research in general. It is also not clear what proportion
of papers in the local vs. internationally recognized journals is typical for
economic research in other countries. There is some evidence that a relatively
small share of SSH publications from national databases are represented in
WoS: e.g., 15% for Poland and 25.9% for Slovakia [1]. In our data set, only
5.6% of publications are indexed in the WoS, but our dataset contains only
journals of Ukrainian publishers. The Ukrainian Scopus statistics used for
Figure 3 (b) is almost three times smaller compared to the Crossref statistics
related to local journals.

In addition, different authors’ motivations can be hidden behind the increase
in co-authorship. It was already mentioned that external factors can change
the natural publishing behavior of researchers. Currently, publications in the
internationally recognized journals (i.e., indexed in Scopus or WoS) are
prioritized by Ukrainian Policies. Presumably, it is easier to perform the
high-quality research and, therefore, to get published in top journals for a
team rather than for an individual. Moreover, one can speculate about
financial benefits of collective submission. Due to the persistent under-
funding of Ukrainian research, it is hardly possible to cover article
processing charges (if any), especially in foreign journals, using
institutional funds. Another interesting question is to check, if the
publishing behaviour of authors differs concerning OA-journals, which often
use the “Golden” principle of charging authors for manuscript processing.

Figure 4: The distributions of Ukrainian economic publications by the number
of co-authors based on Crossref data (excluding publications which are also
indexed in Scopus or WoS) — squares; Scopus data only for OA-journals —
circles; Scopus data only for non-OA-journals — triangles.

To find an answer, the distributions of papers by the number of co-authors for
different data subsets are compared in Figure 4. One can see that while the
shapes are more similar for Crossref and Scopus non-OA publications, a
different one is observed for Scopus OA data. The typical values can be
derived for the latter: more than 40% of all OA papers are written by groups
of four or five authors. On the other hand, the distribution for OA papers is
characterized by short tail indicating a natural upper limit. Presumably, too
large co-authorship team makes individual benefit from OA paper insignificant.
It is also harder to manage fair sharing of expenses within the large group of
contributors. Nevertheless, there is a reason to accept the hypothesis about a
significant role of economic benefit from collective submission of OA papers.

_Geographic landscape._ Since affiliation field is not included in OUCI
export, Crossref API was used to acquire these data for the publications in
the data set. Moreover, affiliation data can be partially reconstructed from
authors’ fields due to incorrectly deposited metadata (see Figure 5).

Figure 5: An example of incorrectly deposited Crossref metadata: two authors
and their affiliation data are described as four separate authors.

Affiliation information was obtained for $\approx 58.4\%$ of records in this
way. Using a prepared list of keywords, contributing countries were detected
for 13,985 papers. Within this subset, the majority of papers are related to
Ukraine: almost 82% of all contributions are made by Ukrainian authors only,
and almost 2% are submitted in international collaboration. In general, the
geographical spectrum is diverse. While data statistics is very poor until
2012–2013, already 12 foreign countries that made contributions to Ukrainian
economic research were found for this period. Presumably due to the more
active depositing of Crossref metadata, the explosion of the general number of
countries is observed in 2016: it tripled starting from 22 and ending with 65.
This number is increasing further until 107 in 2020 (on average, authors from
75 countries contribute annually). However, only few foreign countries
provided at least 1% of all publications in Ukrainian economic journals. TOP10
of foreign countries by the number of contributions is as follows:

  * •

SOUTH AFRICA 324 (2.3%) publications – 7 of them are co-contributed with
Ukraine;

  * •

POLAND 193 (1.4%) – 91;

  * •

INDONESIA 158 (1.13%) – 2;

  * •

USA 143 (1.02%) – 20;

  * •

NIGERIA 109 (0.78%) – 4;

  * •

SLOVAKIA 107 (0.77%) – 10;

  * •

INDIA 102 (0.73%) – 1;

  * •

RUSSIA 94 (0.7%) – 13;

  * •

CZECH REPUBLIC 79 (0.56%) – 14;

  * •

JORDAN 70 (0.5%) – 2.

Given that some papers can be attributed to more than one Part of the World,
it is found that foreign European and Asian countries have contributed equally
(38.6% of papers are related to each category). Almost one fifth (19.8%) of
publications correspond to African countries (the highest peak is found in
2016), over 6.8% – to North America and small shares to Oceania (1.4%) and
South America (0.94%).

The annual share of internationally collaborative papers (two or more
countries are involved) is small: less than 5.5% since 2016 and even lesser
before. In general, 570 (4%) of papers are characterized by bilateral
international collaborations and 54 ($0.39\%$) are related to three countries.
The largest number of countries per one paper is four: two such publications
are found (BAHRAIN–EGYPT–TURKEY–LITHUANIA and CZECH
REPUBLIC–MOLDOVA–UKRAINE–POLAND).

Table 1: The statistics of international contributions within Ukrainian economic publication data sets: (i) all the papers labelled by countries; (ii) only papers that are also indexed in Scopus or WoS; (iii) only papers NOT indexed in Scopus or WoS. Category | Number (%) of papers within subsets
---|---
|  All |  Indexed in Scopus or WoS |  Not indexed in Scopus or WoS
Single Ukrainian author |  11430 (81.7%) |  529 (24.3%) |  10901 (92.3%)
Single foreign author |  1929 (13.8%) |  1264 (58.2%) |  665 (5.6%)
Two or more authors, including from Ukraine |  346 (2.5%) |  159 (7.3%) |  187 (1.6%)
Two or more foreign authors |  280 (2%) |  221 (10.2%) |  59 (0.5%)

It is expected that the share of papers written in the international
collaboration is higher for publications in high-level journals, in particular
in those indexed in Scopus and Wos (international co-authorship is even
encouraged by these services). To give an example, over half of economic
publications from ASEAN countries (1979–2010) are internationally
collaborative in [26]. To some extent, this expectation is also satisfied for
Ukrainian data (see Table 1). Having in mind that many of countries do not
have common papers with Ukraine, one can speculate about different motivations
of foreign contributors: while some of them are interested in collaboration
with Ukraine, others can consider Ukrainian journals (especially those indexed
in the international databases) as an additional platform for publishing own
results. Some hints can be derived by comparing the lists of foreign countries
that are top contributors or/and top collaborators. One third of foreign
countries are not connected by collaborative papers with Ukraine.

To investigate the structure and the strength of international collaboration
links in Ukrainian economic journals, the co-authorship network at the level
of countries was built. Each of 107 nodes represents a particular country that
has contributed at least once. The link connects two countries if they are
found in one paper at least once. Link width (strength) is proportional to the
number of common publications.

Figure 6: Probability distributions of nodes degrees (squares) and links
widths (circles) for the collaboration network at the level of countries. The
numbers indicate the estimated slopes for linear approximations. The rectangle
frames the outlier of $w$ (it corresponds to the link between Ukraine and
Poland).

The network is sparse (284 links in total), but 89.7% of all nodes are
mutually reachable being the part of the single connected component. The rest
11 nodes are isolated. Each country is connected to five others on average.
Naturally, the largest hub is Ukraine (with degree $k=60$). The rest node
degrees are distributed by power law with exponent close to the “classical”
$-1$ ($-0.96$ for our data, see Figure 6). This is a very typical feature of
collaboration networks in general. It is interesting to note that the
distribution of link widths (strengths) can be approximated by power-law as
well; however, the absolute value of exponent is much larger ($-1.79$).
Therefore, some natural limit for international collaboration intensity is
observed. But there is a country, which is rather an outlier in this context
(it is framed and not taken into account for linear approximation on Figure 6)
— the strength of the link between Ukraine and Poland is much higher than one
would expect. Besides Poland with 91 common papers, TOP5 of countries that are
most strongly connected with Ukraine includes the USA (20), Lithuania (17),
the United Kingdom (15); Germany and Czech Republic share the 5th position
(14). This particular list suggests typical patterns of international
collaboration: governed by geographical, historical and cultural proximities
that are especially typical for social science compared to the physical and
life sciences, and core-periphery-like ones in the context of collaboration of
more “advanced” and developing countries [25, 24, 33, 34]. In this respect,
Poland is a very natural partner for Ukraine, being at the same time close in
many ways and more developed.

_Citations analysis._ Since the majority of Ukrainian economic journals (and
87% of publications in our data set) are not indexed in Scopus and Web of
Science, Crossref data is a unique source of citation data based on the usage
of DOI numbers. Despite increased popularity of the Initiative for Open
Citations, deposited metadata are often incomplete [19]. As long as references
lists are not properly deposited and openly available, the analysis of
citation data is unreliable. Therefore, only the description of our data set
in respect to available citation data can be offered. 1,499 papers ($6.3\%$)
are cited at least once, according to Crossref.

Figure 7: Relative distributions of citation counts among papers with
different numbers of co-authors (Upper panel); published in different years
(Lower panel). General distributions of all papers from entire data set are
shown by black circles. Distributions only for cited papers are shown by
orange diamonds (real data) and grey circles (real citation counts are
randomly reshuffled).

To see if the number of citation counts correlate with the number of co-
authors, the relative distribution of cited publications is compared with the
general distribution of all publications. To take into account that the subset
of cited publications is comparatively small, the same distributions are also
built for subsets occurred after random reassigning citation counts over
entire data set (100 reshuffles were performed). Figure 7 shows that the real
distribution of cited papers differs from the distributions built for entire
data set and for randomly reshuffled samples. The share of solo-publications
is noticeably lower in the subset of cited publication (35% vs. 50%).
Correspondingly, the share of cited papers with three or more co-authors is
greater than expected (36% vs. 20%). Our results are consistent with those
authors who found that collaborative papers are typically better cited, see,
e.g. [24].

The geography of authors plays a role as well: 8.8% of papers labelled by
countries are cited at least once, but this share is almost three times larger
for the internationally collaborative papers (26.2%). Of course, this is
rather expected due to the fact that the majority of internationally
collaborative papers is indexed in Scopus or WoS data bases.

The characteristic age of citations can be derived in a similar way. The
positions of peaks, which correspond to the number of cited papers (2017) and
the number of published papers (2019), allows one to suggest that for
Ukrainian economic papers it typically takes two years to get cited.

##  5 Conclusions

This work has a number of goals. First of all, this is the first large-scale
quantitative analysis of the Ukrainian Economics discipline. While the
majority of Ukrainian scientific journals, especially in the domain of SSH,
are not indexed in the international abstract databases such as Scopus or Web
of Science, and the Ukrainian Research Information System (URIS444see
https://dntb.gov.ua/en/implemented-and-perspective-projects/ukrainian-
research-information-system-uris-3) is only announced, no centralised source
of Ukrainian scholarly publication metadata currently exists. However, recent
changes in Ukrainain policies have led to an increase in DOI assigning to
research papers and, therefore, the splash of metadata deposits to the
Crossref system. This opened the door for a quantitative analysis of Ukrainian
research data. Such analysis aims to better understand national scholarly
disciplines. Thus, the first goal of the paper is to provide information that
can be used to support the decision making for research management.

Secondly, this is one of the first examples of a large-scale and longitudinal
quantitative analysis based on the open Crossref data. In particular, the
advantages of the OUCI interface for gathering Ukrainian data are discussed.
It can be concluded that Crossref metadata is a perspective source that can be
used to measure the citation impact and understand trends in local scientific
publication micro-system, especially for non-English publications that are
poorly represented in commercial citation databases. Active support of open
initiatives, such as Initiative for Open Citations, is highly encouraged in
order to provide more reliable statistics for analysis of research data.

Thirdly, the case study targeted at economic research is provided. It is
centered on Ukraine – an East European country with emerging economy, whose
national research is understudied and influenced by peculiarities such as
Cyrillic writing and non-English speaking. The obtained quantitative results
are discussed and compared to others published previously and based on
different data sets.

Data analysis only at the level of publications is performed in this work.
However, different aspects are studied: the collaborative nature of economic
research, its geographic landscape, and some peculiarities of citation
statistics. We found that Ukrainian economics is characterized by a comparably
small share of co-authored publications, however, it demonstrates the tendency
towards more collaborative output. One can speculate about the differences in
the publishing behaviour of Ukrainian researchers in Economics, which depends
on the targeted journals. On the one hand, “delayed” collaboration patterns
compared to world trends are observed for publications in national journals.
This gives one a reason to speculate about the dominantly qualitative and
theoretical nature of economic research at the national level. On the other
hand, a higher level of international and individual cooperation is found for
papers published in high-level journals indexed in Scopus or Web of Science
data bases. Such papers are also typically better cited.

The geography of authors who make the contributions to Ukrainian economic
journals was inspected. While part of foreign contributors collaborate with
Ukrainian scholars producing co-authored outputs, the others naturally
consider Ukrainian journals indexed in the international abstract data bases
as a platform to efficiently disseminate their results. The proper external
incentives could be organized in order to influence both segments improving
Ukrainian international collaboration structure and fortifying national
scientific journals. To give an example, such national compensation or reward
programs aimed at improving publishing activity exist in many countries.

Finally, some future prospects for this work can be drawn. While only the most
straightforward way of data analysis – at the publication level – is used in
this work, there is a potential to study the collected data at the level of
authors. Many other aspects can be investigated: publication productivity and
collaboration patterns of individual scholars, gender peculiarities, etc.
However, more technical steps are required first: the peculiarities of
Ukrainian metadata, such as non-native English names and the usage of Cyrillic
alphabet, complicate the process of author disambiguation. It is also planned
to analyse co-authorship networks at the level of authors.

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