What’s in the Name? Polish-British Academic Collaboration

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the Polish system of science and higher education has faced several important changes. By entering the European Union Poland received access to extra research funds and fully developed its participation in the EU sponsored Erasmus mobility scheme. Two waves of reforms of Polish higher education emphasized the importance of international academic collaboration. The paper analyzes trends in academic collaboration between British and Polish researchers, covering the years 2000-2020. It is based on a detailed analysis of publications indexed by Scopus, with a concurring country affiliation of the ‘United Kingdom’ and ‘Poland’ resulting in 36,582 publications in total. Even a simple descriptive statistical analysis based on ‘Subject Areas’ and ‘Keywords’ (as identified by Scopus) provided enough data to examine whether the changes of Polish higher education policy actually resulted in strengthening Polish-British academic collaboration. It has also helped to identify a few fields of studies that brought promising growth in a number of joint publications, with ‘Medicine’ being the most prominent example.