Abstract

Despite being geographically located in the Northern Hemisphere, Central Asia countries share structural similarities with Global South research systems, which remain peripheral in global knowledge production and whose scientific achievements rarely attract wide international attention. Yet between 2000 and 2025, Scopus-indexed social science publications from the region experienced rapid growth from 19 to 2,605 respectively. This expansion raises a key question: does increased output signal substantive integration into global scholarly networks, or does it primarily reflect metric-driven policy incentives within structurally underfunded research systems? While existing bibliometric studies tend to aggregate Central Asia within broader post-Soviet analyses, or focus narrowly on individual countries or specific disciplinary fields - typically in natural and hard sciences - the social sciences, historically ideologized and institutionally marginalized during the Soviet period -remain underexamined as a distinct regional field.

This study approaches Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) as a distinct regional research system shaped by the Soviet-era legacies of academic dependency, low R&D investment, and the consequences of metric-based governance for knowledge production in emerging systems. It investigates how authorship and collaboration patterns in internationally visible social science research have evolved over the past 25 years, and how different forms of collaboration relate to publication quality and citation impact.

The analysis draws on a longitudinal dataset of 13,457 Scopus-indexed social science articles with at least one Central Asian affiliation. These publications are treated not as a comprehensive measure of regional scholarship, but as an indicator of internationally visible research activity. The study examines three levels of analysis: single-authored publications, author-level co-authorship, and national, regional, and international collaboration. It evaluates collaboration intensity, team size, citation impact, and journal quality.

Preliminary findings suggest that international collaboration is associated with higher citation impact and publication in higher-ranked journals; however, this advantage appears unevenly distributed across countries and collaboration structures, and may reflect asymmetric integration into global knowledge networks, reinforcing existing hierarchies of knowledge production. The findings have direct policy relevance for higher education systems in Central Asia. They suggest that policies focused narrowly on publication counts risk reinforcing dependence on external collaboration and may not lead to sustainable improvements in research quality. Instead, strengthening domestic capacity, supporting balanced partnerships, and prioritizing quality-based evaluation may offer more sustainable alternatives.