A natural experiment reveals the impact of geopolitical shocks on the trajectory of a nation’s scientific enterprise

A nation’s scholarly enterprises can be impacted by external geopolitical factors. To investigate such impacts, we study the natural experiment that occurred within Germany, whose territory was partitioned following World War II and then reunified in 1990. We use data from journal publications and regional economic indicators to investigate the trajectories of scholarly activity in both East and West German regions over the past 60 years. As a control for any observed changes in Germany, we also consider the scholarly output of two comparable countries, Austria and Switzerland. We find that East and West German research organizations were able to recover from the impact of the war in a similar manner. We also find that reunification and control of the scholarly enterprise by West Germany altered the scholarship focus of East German institutions. At the institutional level, we find strong evidence of the Matthew effect for institutions in West Germany, but less so for East German institutions. These findings demonstrate both the resilience of strong scholarly enterprises to shocks and the fact that scholarly enterprise can be remodeled over the span of a decade. Our findings offer sobering warnings about the impact of ongoing changes in the US scholarly enterprise.