International cooperation of polish researchers with partners from abroad: A scientometric study

Publications resulting from international cooperation and included in seven SCI annual files 1987–1989 and 1992–1995 were analyzed. It was observed that after the political changes of the turn of 1980s considerable increase in the number of publications was accompanied by the geographic development of co-authorship. Information coming from SCI 1992–1995, elaborated, completed and encoded were entered into an own database designed for analytical purposes. During these four years above 9600 papers were published in over 1600 prestige journals, of which almost 2200 publications resulted from multilateral cooperation. Altogether the foreign coauthors came from 102 countries, but over 80% of international papers were published in cooperation with the partners from 11 countries. The domestic participants came from over 200 research and educational organizations. It was found that the biggest share of papers within this multidisciplinary file represented physics (≈40%), chemistry (≈21%), and biomedical research (≈11%).