Jointly published by Elsevier Science Ltd, Oxford Scientometrics,

and Akad~miai Kiad6, Budapest Vol. 44, No. 2 (1999) 183-192

YUGOSLAV POLITICS, "ETHNIC CLEANSING"

AND CO-AUTHORSHIP IN SCIENCE
G. LEWISON, 1 R. IGIC 2

18 Nylands Avenue, Kew, Richmond, Surrey, TW9 4HH (England)

2Department of Anesthesiology and Pain Management, Cook County Hospital, Chicago, IL 60612 (USA)

(Received October 26, 1998)

Scientific outputs from Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, and the patterns of co-authorship
between them and five western countries and with each other have been determined from the
Science Citation Index9 They reflect accurately the political situation underlying the recent break-
up of the former Yugoslavia, and long-term international alliances and friendships, but also take
account of geographical proximity, which assists scientific co-operation. There is no evidence of
changes in the ethnic composition of Serbian and Croatian scientists overall, as revealed by the
names of their researchers before and after the civil war. However some changes appear to have
taken place in Serbia outwith Belgrade, which are consistent with the reports of the expulsion of
Croats living in Vojvodina.

Introduction

The disintegration of the former Yugoslavia in 1991 and a subsequent civil war
disrupted many local and international social, cultural and scientific activities in the
Balkan state. The crisis only worsened ethnic and cultural divides that already existed
among the South Slavs in the region where struggle for the tripartite Muslim-Catholic-
Orthodox dominance for the Mediterranean world has lasted for centuries. 1,2
Most people from the former Yugoslavia are one ethnos with six nations, and speak
one of three different languagels: Slovenian, Macedonian, or Serbian/Croatian, which
consists of several dialects and can be written using both Roman and Cyrillic alphabets.
While Croats use only the Roman alphabet, Serbs mainly use Cyrillic. However the
language is itself being progressively modified to make it reflect the three separate
traditions by the introduction' of new words and the legal suppression of others. 3
Religion also divides the region. Whereas the Croats and Slovenians are Roman
Catholics, the Serbs, Montenegrins and Macedonians are Eastern Orthodox Christians.
Muslims, now living in Bosnia or a small part of Serbia, are Slavs who converted to

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G. LEWISON, R. IGIC: YUGOSLAV POLITICS AND CO-AUTHORSHIP

Islam during the five centuries of Turkish rule. 4,5 Bosnian Muslims speak
Serbian/Croatian, but are adding new words and calling it "Bosniak'.

- ~ AUSTRIA --/--~ i
. 4.,

ITALY I LJubljana ~~ ~ ~ HUNGARY /- _ ~ ~ _ ~f- "

9 J Zagreb ~- / 9/ ~-

. ~ ~.J /. r j Karlovac CROATIA VOJVOD[NA f

f~"~ ~'-~-~/ ,t. , 9 e t.~ I ROMANIA
q I - Osijek I ,
I ~ Krajina 9 .~ 9 NOV[Sad "~.

Banja Luka . 2" ~ i elgrade

I L ~ ~'4
& ", Tuzla / "xl ""

Ix BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA 9 x /'~
\'~ ' Saraj . . . . ' SERBIA / ;

~- ~%~'-.- ' ' 8ULGAR,,

- ), _ Split ' , ~ I
~ '', /:':'', . Nis ' ' ,

0 1 -" ". /
~1 MONTENEGRO.,'. Pristina f"
" 9 '. 9 L
"~ W ~ . . - ' Podgorica, .. x
Dubrovnik " ~ 9 /" x.*'~, KOSOVO .-. - //

~ . L . . ~ L B A N IsA ~ t~
~.. 9 Sko "e
PJ -~ ~;.

/ J !' MACEDONIA

Fig. 1. Map showingYugoslav states and majorcities

A post-communism nationalism and religious romanticism has taken a huge toll in

Yugoslavia. In this civil war, some 141,000 Muslims, 97,000 Serbs and over 28,000
Croats were killed. 6 The war displaced more than two million people, and divided
Bosnia into Muslim, Serbian and Croatian regions. It also resulted in the creation of the
ethnic-based state of Croatia (see Fig. 1), which is now virtually without a Serbian
population following the removal of more than half a million Serbs from the Krajina
region. However despite the war and reduced communication among the three major
cultural groups during the conflict, scientific research and publications have managed
to survive and even flourish in many areas of the war-toru country. 7
The purpose of our study was to assess the influence of the war on scientific output,
as measured by changes in the numbers o f papers indexed in the Science Citation lndex
(SCI) from various parts of the former Yugoslavia. We focussed on Serbia, including
Vojvodina, on Croatia and on Slovenia: the remainder of the country has a relatively

184 Scientometrics 44 (1999)

 G. L E W I S O N , R. IGIC: Y U G O S L A V P O L I T I C S A N D C O - A U T H O R S H I P

small scientific presence and we treated it as a fourth part of Yugoslavia for analysis
purposes. We sought evidence in the scientific literature of the large-scale forcible
removal of populations or "ethnic cleansing" that took place in Croatia, and also in
Serbia and Vojvodina. 8
We also wanted to explore the extent to which Western European nations, and the
USA, reflected in their scientific behaviour the links and alliances pursued over many
years by their politicians. To this end, we determined the extent of scientific co-
operation between the three new Balkan states, and their geographical predecessor
regions, and five western countries: Germany (including the former DDR), France,
Italy, the United Kingdom and the USA. The period of our analysis was 1985 to 1996.

Method

The analysis was performed using the SCI in the CD-ROM version. Only articles,
notes and reviews were counted, and integer counting was used throughout (so that a
paper co-authored between Serbia and Slovenia would count as unity for each state and
not half). No account was taken of the number of authors with addresses in a country:
indeed, the SCI does not provide this information. The search strategy was based
primarily on the names of cities within each state, but postcodes were also employed to
search for occasional papers from small towns. The four Yugoslav states were defined
mainly as shown in Table 1 (some very small towns in terms of scientific output have
not been included here for the sake of brevity).

Table 1
Search strategy used to retrieve papers from four Yugoslav states and the UK from the SCI

Serbia (SB) YU-1 * or Y U - 2 * or YU-3* or B E L G R A D E or B O R or K R A G U J E V A C or

L E S K O V A C or NIS or NOVI~SAD or P R I S T I N A
Croatia (HR) YU-4* or YU-5* or HR-I * or HR-2* or HR-3* or HR~ or HR-5* or
D U B R O V N I K or OSIJEK or ROVINJ or SPLIT or Z A G R E B
Slovenia (SL) YU-6* or S L - I * or SL-2* or SL-3* or SL-4* or SL-5* or SL-6* or
CELJE or D O M Z A L E or LJUBLJANA or MARIBOR or M E D V O D E or
NOVO-MESTO
Other Yugoslavia YU-7* or Y U - 8 * or YU-9* or B O S N I A & H E R C E G or M O N T E N E G R O
or B A N J A - L U K A or KOTOR or PODGORICA or S A R A J E V O or S K O P J E
or T I T O G R A D or T U Z L A
United Kingdom N O R T H - I R E L A N D or ( W A L E S not ((PRINCE or N E W ) and
( H O N G - K O N G or NSW))) or ( S C O T L A N D not ( A L B A N Y and N E W ) ) or
( E N G L A N D not (NEW and MA))

Scientometrics 44 (1999) 18 5
G. LEWISON, R. IGIC: YUGOSLAV POLITICS AND CO-AUTHORSHIP

The numbers of papers from each of these four states were determined for each year
from 1985 to 1996. For the first three years of the period (1985-87) and the last three
(1994-96), we listed all the names of authors from Serbia and from Croatia who had
written papers without co-authorship with the other, or with any of the five western
countries mentioned above. Many of these names could be identified as typically Serb
or typically Croat, and in this way we were able to investigate if there had been any
change in the ethnic composition of the researchers located in Serbia and Croatia. [This
process was accomplished by the second author (a Serb) in consultation with his wife (a
Croat).] However many people of other nationalities who have lived in Croatia since
1914 became Croats and their names were included as such. This may also have
increased the apparent number of Croats in nearby Vojvodina and hence in Serbia.
We also counted the numbers of papers co-authored between each pair of Serbia = SB,
Croatia = HR and Slovenia = SL; and between each of these and the five western countries
listed: Germany = DE; France = FR; Italy = IT; the United Kingdom = UK and the USA =
US. For the United Kingdom a special search statement was used, see Table 1, to avoid
papers with England, Scotland or Wales in their address that were not from the UK.
The amount of international co-authorship was calculated by means of a "Salton
Index", 9 equal to the number of co-authored papers between two countries divided by
the square root of the product of the number of papers each produced in the given
period. This indicator has the advantage of being non-dimensional and gives a good
estimate of the variation of co-authorship between nations of greatly different scientific
output. 10,11 Because of the annual fluctuations in the numbers of papers in the SCI,
which is particularly pronounced for small countries, three-year running means were
determined for the bibliometric indicators so as to smooth out their more extreme
variations and allow time trends to be seen more clearly.

Results

The annual outputs of papers from the four Balkan states are shown in Fig. 2. The
outputs of Bosnia & Herzegovina are not shown separately from "other Yugoslavia",
but they peaked at over 50 papers per year from 1988 to 1990 and have since declined
sharply to fewer than 20 per year.
Of the 5100 names of scientists from Serbia and Croatia who published papers in the six
years, 1985-87 and 1994-96, it was possible to identify 837 as typically Serb, such as Kostic
and Dimitrijevic, and 1314 as typically Croat, such as Horvatic and Marusic. This enabled
about half the researchers to be assigned to one or the other group. Table 2 shows the
distribution of identifiable names in the two states in the two periods.

186 Scientometrics 44 (1999)

 G. LEWISON, R. IGIC: YUGOSLAV POLITICS AND CO-AUTHORSHIP

Table 2
Composition by ethnic group of identifiable Serb and Croat researchers in two periods

State Period n Serb, % Croat, %

Serbia 85-7 4447 42.5 12.1

94-6 5614 39.5 11.1
Croatia 85-7 3188 7.0 39.9
94-6 4881 7.0 40.3

Figure 3 shows the Salton Index values for the three combinations, Serbia-Croatia
(SB-HR), Serbia-Slovenia (SB-SL) and Croatia-Slovenia (HR-SL). Figs 4-6 show the
same values for Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia, respectively, with each of the five
western nations. (The numbers of internationally co-authored papers from the rest of
Yugoslavia are too few to be worth plotting graphically.) Slovenia's co-operation with
Austria (AT), its northern neighbour, is also shown in Fig. 6: it has been rising even
faster than with the other nations of Western Europe.

Discussion

Figure 2 shows that the first three states now have a similar level of scientific
production, at least in the international journals processed for the SCI, but that in the
late 1980s Serbia was well in the lead, with more than twice as many papers as
Slovenia. Production in Serbia began to fall in 1992, coinciding with the height of
hostilities when United Nations sanctions were imposed on the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). In Bosnia-Herzegovina, output of papers was at a
maximum from 1989-90, and has now declined sharply as a result of the disruption
caused by the civil war to barely one third of the peak.
In view of the evidence of ethnic cleansing that took place in both Serbia and
Croatia, the results shown in Table 2 are rather surprising. It may be that scientists were
under less political pressure than the ordinary populations of the two states. A further
contributory factor may be the greater likelihood of intermarriage of scientists with
members of the other ethnic group, which could have preserved their positions.
However a more compelling reason may be that the scientists tend to live in the two
capitals and other major cities, whereas the ethnic cleansing took place mainly in small
towns and in the countryside. 8

Scientometrics 44 (1999) 187

G. LEWISON, R, 1GIC: YUGOSLAV POLITICS AND CO-AUTHORSHIP

900

. . . . . . . . . . . . y. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

.o0
760 iii
800

500 - - 9 . . .9 . . . .--- -='" ~ .....................

400

"~" " r ~ Serbia, SB ~_[

300
- u - Croatia, HR I I
200 ~ Slovenia, SL ]-~--~
--
m l

---o'-- Other YU ] I

0 . . . . . .

1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995

Fig. 2. Outputs of articles, notes and reviews in the SCI for four parts of former Yugoslavia, three-year
moving averages

0.06

005

/ \ i" 9 " SB+SL I i

0.04

003

0,02
. - D - - "IF " " "l~ . .

" m .

0.01 ..... 9 ~ ~ _ . 1 ~

O.O0
1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995

Fig. 3. Co-authorship between Croatia (HR), Serbia (SB) and Slovienia (SL): three-year smoothed
Salton Index values for SC1 papers

188 Scientometrics 44 (1999)

 G. LEWISON, R. IGIC: YUGOSLAV POLITICS AND CO-AUTHORSHIP

0.014

0.012
~ "DE- o- FR 1
IT .,-o- UK
0.010
----US
0.008

0.006

0.004
~'---..o---- -" '~ . ~ -"

0.002

0.000 I i I. I I i

1986 1967 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993

Fig. 4. Salton Index (three-year moving averages) for transnational co-authorship for Serbia

0.014

0.012

-.t IT ---o- UK
0.010
- - - - U S

0.008

0.006

. . . - o

0.004
I
" "---~..- ..- : . . . . ' . q .~. _ - - - - ocJ. - - - " .......o-.-. - -- .o--

0.002 q.

0.000
1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1962 1993

Fig. 5. Salton Index (three-year moving averages) for transnational co-authorship for Croatia

Scientometrics 44 (1999.) ] 89
G. LEWISON,R. IGIC:YUGOSLAVPOLITICSAND CO-AUTHORSHIP

0.016

0,014 ..................................................................................................................................................................
~ .

o.o12 ..............................................
; .....................................................................................................
O.OLO~ DE-a-FR~ ....................................
~....-...l
/ ~- ,T--o- UK1 ''".-----.--~./ /
0.008 ..................... ] - - -- US ~ - AT I ................................................. ~,,'-f ........./ ..................
/ / I ; ' / ;
o o o , , ..................................................................... , .........................

o.o y ...........................
. ............................................. ..............................

o.ooe~ - - " " " _.2...2..:.;.~...'.........................................

0.000~ ~ I
1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1gg I 1992 1993

Fig. 6. Salton Index(three-yearmovingaverages)for transnational co-authorshipfor Slovenia

In order to investigate this possibility, the analysis was repeated but only for Serbian
papers from cities other than Belgrade and for Croatian papers from cities other than
Zagreb. Papers co-authored with the other Balkan states and the five western countries
were again excluded. There were very few such Croatian papers and so additional ones
were sought from years 1988-89 (before the war) and from January to June 1997 (after
the war). The results are shown in Table 3. It is clear that they are different from those
of Table 2. In Serbia, the reduction in the percentage of Croats and the increase in the
percentage of Serbs are statistically highly significant (chisquare = 31.3, d/f = 2) with
p < 0.0001, but in Croatia the reduction in the percentage of Serbs and the increase in
the percentage of Croats are not significant. This result was unexpected, because
approximately twenty times more Serbs from Croatia went to Serbia than v i c e v e r s a .
However in Croatia , the ethnic cleansing occurred mainly in the rural areas where there
was little scientific activity. By contrast in Serbia, and especially in Vojvodina, north of
Belgrade, there were many Croats living in cities and when some were forced to leave
there may have been s'eientists among them. Overall, there have been bigger increases
in the numbers of researchers outside the capitals than in them. This may in part reflect
differing publication patterns in the 1990s, with more effort to publish in international

190 Scientometrics 44 (1999)

 G. LEWISON, R. IGIC: YUGOSLAV POLITICS AND CO-AUTHORSHIP

journals, but it could also represent the inward movement of Serbs to Serbia and Croats
to Croatia from other parts of the former Yugoslavia.

Table 3
Composition by ethnic group of identifiable Serb and Croat researchers outwith
their state capitals in two periods

State Period n Serb, % Croat, %

Serbia 85-7 556 30.6 18.9

94-6 921 43.1 11.0
Croatia 85-7 175 8.6 37.1
94-6 395 7.6 4Q.8

Figure 3 shows that co-authorship between the three leading Balkan states was
always much higher if it involved Croatia in the late 1980s. This is very understandable
on the basis of simple geography, 12 (see Fig. 1), as Croatia physically separates Serbia
and Slovenia. Although Slovenia achieved independence very quickly in 1991, its
scientists have decreased their co-operation with bbth Serbia and Croatia markedly
since then. It is apparent from Fig. 6 that the reason for this is that they are now turning
increasingly to western Europe. Indeed the country is the most westernised of the three
as has been confirmed by its admission in 1996 to candidate status for membership of
the European Union.
Despite the amount of co-authorship between Serbia and Croatia almost halving
between 1990 and 1994, it has now started to increase once more as the political
situation between them has at least stabilised with the end of.the war in Bosnia. This is
surprising as the means of contact, both direct through t~avel by rail and road, and
indirect through telecommunications links, have until recently been very difficult. 13
However Serbia seems to be scientifically relatively isolated from Western Europe,
only the UK still maintaining more co-authorship links with it than with Croatia,
possibly reflecting political relationships dating back to World War II. These
relationships seem to have been surprisingly durable, as witness the strong links
between Germany and both Slovenia and Croatia, but not with Serbia, in the 1980s.
Italy's strong co-authorship links with Croatia probably reflect geographical proximity,
however, and its rapid increase in Slovenian co-operation since 1990 may be due to the
settlement of the long-standing dispute over Trieste.

Scientometrics 44 (1999)' 191

G. LEWISON, R. IGIC: YUGOSLAV POLITICS AND CO-AUTHORSHIP

Conclusions

As has been shown earlier, 14 bibliometric indicators provide a sensitive mirror of

the real world and they reveal much of the recent history of Yugoslavia including signs
of "ethnic cleansing" in parts of Serbia. Internationally, we see that scientific co-
operation does not take place in a vacuum but is based firmly on the geographical and
political situation that prevails in the real world.

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192 Scientometrics 44 (1999)