Russia accused of weaponizing science in Ukraine

Papers in scientific journals are increasingly citing universities based inside occupied Ukrainian territories as being affiliated with Russia, a new analysis has found.

In 2022, 16 of the 156 studies (10.4%) published by researchers based at institutions in Donetsk, a region in southeast Ukraine, and indexed by the database Scopus listed the city as being in the Russian Federation. In 2023, 115 of 177 studies (65%) published and indexed the same way listed the city as being in the federation, according to the analysis, which was published on arXiv in October without peer review.

Similarly, in 2022, just 1 of the 38 academic papers (3%) published by researchers in Lugansk, Ukraine, located the region in Russia; last year, 23 of 46 papers (50%) located the city there, the analysis says.

Russia-backed separatists have controlled Donetsk and Lugansk—collectively known as Donbas—since 2014. Russian President Vladimir Putin formally annexed them in 2022.

Tetiana Berger Hryn’ova, a particle physicist at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) who coauthored the analysis, says the misidentification of occupied Ukrainian territories as being part of Russia is systematic.

“It is a problem in our opinion, because it means that the scientific community accepts them as being part of Russia, even though legally, in most countries, as well as in United Nations resolutions, these territories belong to Ukraine,” says Hryn’ova, who was born in Ukraine.

Hryn’ova adds that the practice of mislabeling Ukrainian territories has been going on for years. She notes that scientific papers list institutions in Crimea, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014, as being part of that country more than 90% of the time.

“This effect is not irreversible, and it is community dependent,” Hryn’ova says. She points to papers published by the high-energy physics community: they have a lower rate of misidentification of occupied Ukrainian territories than publications in Scopus do, according to a separate, non-peer-reviewed analysis she published on the HAL open archive in October. “It’s probably because there is systematic effort by scientists to insist that their publications do not appear as such,” she says.

Hryn’ova says it’s important for journals and publishers to police academic papers to ensure that occupied territories are not misidentified. That includes the editorial board members’ institutions, which are often listed as being in Russia rather than occupied areas of Ukraine. Proceedings from meetings and symposia should also be monitored, she adds.

Most academics and students in occupied territories relocated to temporary premises in other parts of Ukraine to continue their work while the war is ongoing, Hryn’ova says.

Meanwhile, Russia created what she calls “duplicate institutes” on the premises of those in the occupied territories. Russian scientists were appointed to work at those “imposter institutes” and began publishing papers that cite them as being affiliated with Russia. She says the move is part of a “coordinated effort” of misappropriation of Ukrainian territories as Russian.

“They also represent themselves on the international stage, claiming that they are an institute which has existed for so many years,” she says. “I think it puts the scientific community in a very complex legal situation.”

Neither the Russian Academy of Sciences nor the Russian Science Foundation responded to requests for comment.

Ludo Waltman, scientific director at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University, says the new study is “methodologically ok.”

Waltman says that the struggle to accurately represent national identity in scientific databases is not new and points to Kosovo as an example. Kosovo is not a member of the UN, but it is formally recognized as an independent country by some nations. While some scientists call Kosovo an independent nation, others consider it part of Serbia or Albania.

Hryn’ova says that academic journals around the world should not accept any paper produced by researchers in occupied territories and that scientists in all fields should stop working with those at institutes in occupied lands. “This would send a strong message saying that it is not acceptable to come into somebody’s institute, occupy it, and then claim it belongs to you,” she says.

Gaétan de Rassenfosse, a science, technology, and innovation policy scholar at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL), who has studied the effects of war on Ukrainian research, says the core issue is that publishers don’t check the affiliation information that authors provide. “As a first-order principle, the practice of trusting authors makes sense: authors are best placed to choose their own affiliation,” de Rassenfosse says. “Sometimes, however, there can be misuse, and the article reports one such case.” A similar problem is authors falsely claiming to be associated with prestigious institutions.

Asking publishers to decide how affiliations should be listed may not be an easy task, de Rassenfosse says, because that could raise questions about other territorial conflicts and regional disputes around the world.

A spokesperson for the Dutch publishing giant Elsevier, which runs the Scopus database, notes that the company has stopped all sales of products and services in Russia and Belarus and has closed its offices in Russia.

Scopus does not interfere with the editorial autonomy of the 30,000-plus journals in its database, including editorial decisions on the quality and content of individual papers, according to the spokesperson: “When displaying third-party data in the product, Scopus does not make changes to the data and remains true to the original source.”

A spokesperson for the German publisher Springer Nature similarly says that its policy on geographical affiliation is one of “strict neutrality.”

“Our authors and external editors live in countries where they have to comply with local laws and regulations, including how their affiliations are described,” the spokesperson says. “If they don’t comply, they can face serious consequences. Because of this, we do not dictate the geographical naming conventions used by authors who submit to our journals or those used by editors in their biographies.”