Global science at a crossroads: the rise and fall of international research integration
Ina Ganguli and Megan MacGarvie provide a comprehensive review examining trends in international scientific integration and fragmentation over recent decades. The authors examine international publications data, track scholar and student mobility flows using administrative records, review historical episodes of research disruptions, and assess various empirical study designs that measure the effects of scientific collaboration policies.
Findings
The paper identifies a critical tension between forces promoting scientific integration and those driving fragmentation.
Scientific Integration: International collaboration has grown substantially, with increasing shares of cross-border coauthored articles. International students and postdocs contribute disproportionately to research productivity, while programs like China’s Thousand Talents have successfully built scientific capacity outside traditional hubs. Capital-intensive research in fields like particle physics and genomics increasingly requires international teams.
Forces driving fragmentation:
- Geopolitical tensions: US-China scientific collaboration peaked at 47,118 joint publications in 2020 but began declining after 2017, with a documented 5.2 percentage point decline by 2022
- National security concerns: The US Department of Justice’s China Initiative (2018) reduced ethnically Chinese researchers’ productivity by 8-11%
- Immigration restrictions: New visa restrictions in 2025 and prior policies have diverted international talent to countries like Canada
- Military conflicts: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to suspension of collaboration with Russian institutions across EU and US funding agencies
- COVID-19 pandemic: Temporarily disrupted international mobility and shifted COVID-related research toward more domestic collaborations
Country-specific patterns:
- Only 24% of Indian and 25% of Russian publications involve international collaborators (2023)
- China’s share of internationally coauthored publications declined after 2019
- Russia increasingly collaborates with China and India while collaboration with Western countries has fallen
Historical lessons
Analysis of periods such as World Wars I and II and the Cold War demonstrates that scientific isolation carries substantial long-term costs, including 40-80% declines in citations and reduced productivity for both sides of conflicts.
Science Without Borders? Waxing and Waning Integration in Global Scientific Research and Innovation
Authors: Ina Ganguli, Megan MacGarvie
From: University of Massachusetts Amherst, Boston University
U.S.–China tensions and the erosion of research ties
Robert Flynn, Britta Glennon, Raviv Murciano-Goroff, and Jiusi Xiao analyze how rising U.S.–China geopolitical tensions since 2016 affected scientific collaboration, researcher mobility, and knowledge flows between the two countries using large-scale bibliometric and researcher records. The authors construct several datasets from ORCID and Dimensions bibliometric databases, capturing doctoral student enrollment and retention, publication citation patterns, and researcher productivity for the period 2008–2019. They use difference-in-differences (DiD) regression models with key outcomes measured that include: doctoral program enrollment, post-graduation job locations, citation shares, and publication counts, both in aggregate and weighted by journal impact factor.
Findings
- Mobility: After 2016, ethnically Chinese STEM doctoral student enrollment in U.S. universities fell by approximately 15% (–3.5 percentage points), with a compensating rise in enrollment at other anglophone universities (U.K., Australia, etc.) instead of staying in China. Similarly, the likelihood that ethnically Chinese U.S. graduates remained in the U.S. for post-graduation jobs declined by 4%, with increased outflow to other anglophone countries.
- Knowledge flows: China-based research teams reduced their citation of U.S.-produced science in their publications—especially recent and frontier U.S. work—by 11–16% post-2016, compared to a U.K. benchmark group, indicating disrupted knowledge flows from the U.S. to China. No significant change was observed in U.S. teams’ citation of China-produced science over the same period.
- Researcher productivity: Despite reduced access to U.S. science, U.S.-reliant China-based researchers did not experience a statistically significant decline in publication counts or quality, although there are signals that the trend may worsen if tensions persist. Ethnically Chinese STEM researchers based in the U.S. showed a marked and significant increase in the likelihood of dropping out of scientific publishing.
Overall, the paper concludes that the intensification of U.S.–China tensions has directly reduced the scientific exchange and career mobility of ethnically Chinese researchers, with observable effects on knowledge flows but limited immediate effects on China-based researcher productivity.
Building a Wall Around Science: The Effect of U.S.-China Tensions on International Scientific Research
Authors: Robert Flynn, Britta Glennon, Raviv Murciano-Goroff, Jiusi Xiao
From: Boston University, University of Pennsylvania, Claremont Graduate University
