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

This study examines how Russia's full-scale war against Ukraine affected foreign co-funding, authorship patterns, and the 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 includes articles in Scopus-indexed journals between 2020 and 2023. The share of articles funded by these agencies increased from 8.6% in 2020-2021 to 11.9% in 2022-2023. During the war, the citation impact of MESU-funded articles rose, driven mainly by highly cited articles authored by Ukrainian scholars with foreign co-affiliations, and to a lesser extent by international collaborations. In contrast, the citation impact of NASU- and NRFU-funded articles remained stable. For NASU-funded articles, foreign co-funding was consistently associated with higher citation impact. However, MESU-funded articles published in 2022-2023 without foreign co-funding outperformed those with such funding. Notably, NASU-funded articles without foreign co-funding had citation impact statistically indistinguishable from unfunded articles, yet made up 59.6% of NASU-funded output in 2022-2023. These findings highlight the need to reform research funding allocation in Ukraine to prioritise potentially more impactful work and to strengthen international collaboration, which remains strongly linked to higher research visibility and influence.