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. Collaboration 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 change of annual international co-authorship patterns of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania have been analysed for die periods 1981-1985 and 1984-1993, respectively. It is shown that international collaboration was not developing similarly in the countries under study. 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 relations till 1989. As expected, since 1990 an increasing scientific collaboration with highly developed countries can be observed in all five countries. At the same time, scientific collaboration with the former communist countries shows a clear decline. The great share of international co-authorship links in some countries reflect various tendencies part of which are interpreted with the help of a cardiologic model.