In late September, representatives from NATO-member countries met at the organization’s headquarters in Brussels. The topic of discussion was not the military strength of the Warsaw Pact nations. Neither was it the political strategies to defend Western Europe. Rather, over 100 representatives came together to talk about the state of civil science in the Eastern Bloc.
The gathering was a follow-up to another held in September 1986 on nonmilitary science in the Soviet Union, the proceedings of which were subsequently published (see C. Sinclair, editor, The Status of Soviet Civil Science, Martinus Nijhoff, 1987). In the meeting just concluded, the participants attempted to describe the level and nature of the science currently being conducted in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria, and the problems facing scientists in those countries.
In anticipation of the conference, George Vladutz, the Institute for Scientific Information’s manager of basic research, undertook a bibliometric ...
