Ավելի հարմար փորձառության համար կարող եք տեղադրել մեր հավելվածը անմիջապես ձեր բրաուզերից։
23 767 is the number of researchers with Armenian surnames who published at least once in Scopus between 1901 and 2026. Of these researchers, 92% percent, or 21 672, are affiliated with foreign institutions only; they can be considered part of the Armenian scientific diaspora.
Infocom analyzed data from Scopus, one of the world’s largest academic databases, to better understand the academic potential of the Armenian diaspora, as well as existing and potential collaborations between Armenia-affiliated researchers and foreign-affiliated researchers of Armenian origin.
The scientific world and its output have long been analyzed beyond the boundaries of nation-states and at multiple scales. Science has become fundamentally global: cross-country and cross-institutional collaborations are widespread, while flows of knowledge, information, and interaction routinely transcend state borders.
For Armenia, the global nature of science has a particularly interesting dimension due to the existence of a large historical diaspora. As a result of imperial formation and collapse, wars, genocide, and migration processes over the past thirty years, Armenia has developed an extensive academic diaspora.
We set out to explore the structure of this diaspora and its connections to research conducted within Armenian institutions themselves. As a starting point, we compiled a dictionary of contemporary and historical Armenian surnames based on the armeniapedia.org data and extracted from the Scopus database all publications containing these surnames (see Methodology section).
Of course, the presence of an Armenian surname today does not necessarily imply the preservation of Armenian identity—however defined—nor does it necessarily indicate knowledge of the language or affiliation with Armenian culture. Nevertheless, despite these limitations, we considered it highly valuable to visualize this academic diaspora and examine the existing and potential collaborations between institutions in Armenia and institutions abroad where scholars with Armenian surnames are based.
We began by examining how the “rating” of countries in which scholars with Armenian surnames publish have changed over time. We calculated the number of publications affiliated with each country across the entire period indexed in Scopus. Our dataset spans 125 years: the earliest publication meeting our criteria was indexed in Scopus in 1901. The changing distribution of countries affiliated with researchers with Armenian surnames can be explored in the interactive visualization below.
It is notable that from approximately 1913 onward, the United States became the leading country in terms of publications associated with the Armenian academic diaspora. This likely reflects migration patterns following the Armenian Genocide, as well as the scientific and educational opportunities available in the United States.
As a result, the United States emerged as the principal center of the Armenian academic diaspora. The “race” among countries is itself revealing, but a look at the academic output of the last two years shows that the leading countries are the United States, Russia, Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, leaving Armenia behind. As of April 2026, only the USA is ahead of Armenia. Armenia itself appears among the leading countries, emerging as an independent academic “player” in the late 1960s.
This distribution of countries reflects the broader structure of the Armenian diaspora, historical migration patterns, imperial legacies – being a part of the Soviet Union, Ottoman Empire and Persia in the past, and the contemporary geopolitical landscape.
Before assessing existing collaborations between scholars affiliated with Armenian institutions and Armenian-related researchers in the diaspora, we first examined the overall scientific potential of the Armenian academic diaspora. Which countries and institutions lead in terms of publication output?
To address this question, we selected all publications which didn’t involve any collaborations with Armenia-affiliated scholars, allowing us to isolate the publication activity of the diaspora itself. The distribution of the top 5 institutions across the top 15 countries by the number of publications is presented in the graph below. Among the leading countries are the United States, Russia, and France.
But to what extent is this existing potential actually realized? To answer this question, we divided the dataset into two parts and analyzed it at the publication level by comparing the publication output of the two groups across academic disciplines. The first group included only publications by researchers with Armenian surnames who were not involved in any collaborations with Armenia-based researchers. The second group consisted of publications involving existing collaborations with researchers affiliated with institutions in Armenia.
The graph below presents a comparison between the overall potential and existing collaborations in percentage terms. The existing potential is most fully realized in physics and astronomy, mathematics, and the arts and humanities. However, even in these fields, no more than roughly one quarter of the potential is used.
The Armenian academic diaspora also demonstrates substantial potential in medicine, yet only around 3% of this potential is currently realized through collaborations with Armenia-based scholars.
To assess existing collaborations between Armenia-based researchers and researchers from the Armenian academic diaspora, we calculated co-authored publications involving scholars affiliated exclusively with Armenian institutions and publications authored by researchers with Armenian surnames with foreign affiliations.
This data also includes collaborations within the Armenian government-funded project called “Remote Laboratories”. This project assumes founding research teams in Armenia with foreign PIs. 29 out of 84, or more than 34% of the foreign PIs, have Armenian origin.
The graph below presents collaboration patterns based on co-authored publications for the top 15 countries and the top 5 institutions within each country.
Among the leading countries, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, and France stand out as the most prominent collaborators. On the Armenian side, the largest collaborative hubs are the A. I. Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory (Yerevan Physics Institute) and Yerevan State University.
A clear dominance of physics and physics-related disciplines is evident in these types of collaborations.
We then narrowed our focus to a more specific category of collaborations: affiliation-based collaborations, in which the same individual simultaneously holds Armenian and non-Armenian affiliations. We identified such cases within the broader dataset and calculated the number of resulting publications. The graph below presents the top 15 countries, the top 5 institutions within each country, and the main collaborators on the Armenian side.
The pattern of collaborations in this category differs somewhat from the publication-based collaborations. Armenian scholars most frequently combine Armenian affiliations with affiliations in Russia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and the United States. On the Armenian side, the institutional distribution in these collaborations appears more diversified. In addition to the A. I. Alikhanyan National Science Laboratory (Yerevan Physics Institute) and Yerevan State University, prominent institutions also include Yerevan State Medical University after Mkhitar Heratsi and the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia.
In summary, there are both formal and informal collaborations with Armenian scholars in the diaspora. However, only a very small part of the Armenian academic diaspora’s potential is currently realized through research collaborations. We hope this research will help provide a more detailed understanding of the Armenian academic diaspora and, where possible, lay the groundwork for new collaborations.
Follow the link to explore the map of the Armenian academic diaspora.
To analyze the existing and potential collaboration patterns and create the map of the Armenian academic diaspora, we relied on the Scopus database and extracted all publications indexed from the earliest available records through April 2026 in which authors had Armenian surnames. Scopus does not cover all possible publications, but is quite representative in terms of the academic output.
The primary source for constructing the dictionary of Armenian surnames was Armeniapedia.org, which provides a comprehensive list of Armenian surnames. Importantly, this list includes not only the most common contemporary Armenian surnames but also historical forms that remain in use within the Armenian diaspora.
Importantly, the identification of authors is based on surname patterns and does not imply nationality, identity, or self-identification, although it may overlap with them. In other words, the Armenian character of a surname does not necessarily mean a person identifies them as Armenian, possesses the Armenian language, or has cultural affiliation with the country. Besides, our data does not capture scholars of Armenian descent who have changed their surnames. Rather, surnames serve as an indicator of belonging to the broader and heterogeneous historical Armenian diaspora.
Because a simple search based on Armenian surname patterns yields a substantial number of false positives—particularly in Southeast Asia and China due to transliteration conventions into English and Iran due to the similarity of family names—we conducted additional surname-level analysis and cleaned the list to remove most false-positive cases. In the case of Iran, we removed almost all family names unless their affiliation with the Armenian diaspora could be confidently verified, in order to minimize false positives. We will continue this verification process and will add new researchers of Armenian origin residing in Iran as they are confirmed.
After retrieving Scopus indexed publications, we extracted only authors with Armenian surnames along with their affiliations. A key limitation is that only the first 100 authors per publication were available․ This means we could possibly miss some authors who participated in big research collaborations with more than 100 authors.
The dataset was subsequently enriched with geolocation data for affiliated institutions and disciplinary classifications for publications. Disciplinary categorization of publications was defined based on the categories assigned by Scopus to the journals in which the publications appeared. Using data about affiliation and disciplines we analyzed existing and potential patterns of collaboration of scholars with Armenian affiliations with the scholars from the Armenian diaspora. The geolocation data was used to create a map of Armenian-linked researchers.
Due to the complex nature of some heritage Armenian family names and the peculiarities of transliteration from different languages into English, our database, even after extensive cleaning, may still contain false positives and may exclude some individuals as false negatives. Additionally, due to inconsistencies in affiliation, location, and country data in the Scopus database, our map may also contain inaccuracies. If you spot any such case, please report it via email ([email protected]) and attach a screenshot.
Author contributions:
Iurii Agafonov has extracted and analyzed the Scopus data, made visuals and prepared the article;
Anna Sahakyan has gathered the data of “Remote Laboratories” project, and helped with the cleaning of the false positive cases․
