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Changes in co-publication patterns among China, the European Union (28) and the United States of America, 2016-2021

The COVID-19 global pandemic starting in January 2020 disrupted international collaborations in scholarly exchange, reducing mobility and connections across the globe. An examination of Web of Science-indexed publications from China, the European Union-28 and the United States of America shows a drop in publications numbers coming from the EU-28 and the United States in 2021. Importantly, cooperation between China and the United States drops without a corresponding drop between China and the EU-28. Moreover, the drop in China-USA cooperation can be seen beginning in 2019, before the pandemic, at a time when political tensions around science, technology, and innovation arose, with the United States claiming that China was violating intellectual property norms. The patterns suggest that political tensions, more than the pandemic, influenced the drop in China-USA cooperation.