Funding, authorship patterns and citation impact of articles funded by Ukrainian agencies before and during Russia's full-scale war (2020-2023)

Abstract

This study explores funding, authorship patterns, and citation impact of articles funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine (MESU), the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU), and the National Research Foundation of Ukraine (NRFU). The analysis focuses on articles published in Scopus-indexed journals between 2020 and 2023. The findings show that the share of articles funded by these agencies increased from 8.6% in 2020-2021 to 11.9% in 2022-2023. Foreign co-funding as well as international co-authorship and co-affiliations are consistently associated with higher citation impact. In particular, foreign co-affiliations are associated with higher field-normalised citation impact (FNCI) for MESU-funded articles in 2022-2023, exceeding that of articles jointly funded by MESU and foreign agencies. NASU funding is associated with only modest differences in citation impact relative to unfunded articles. These effects are small and not consistently significant across authorship patterns and become less pronounced in 2022-2023, as the citation impact of unfunded articles partially converges with that of funded articles. While the results should be interpreted as average group-level tendencies rather than deterministic effects, they raise important questions about the effectiveness of current funding allocation mechanisms and evaluation criteria, highlighting the need for evidence-based reform of Ukraine's research funding system.