Analyzing the potential impact of BREXIT on the European research collaboration network.

In this work, we study the impact that the withdrawal of institutions from the United Kingdom caused by BREXIT has on the European research collaboration networks. To this aim, we consider BREXIT as a targeted attack to those graphs composed by the European institutions that have collaborated in research projects belonging to the three main H2020 programs (Excellent Science, Industrial Leadership, and Societal Challenges). The consequences of this attack are analyzed at the global, mesoscopic, and local scales and compared with the changes suffered by the same collaboration networks when a similar quantity of nodes is randomly removed from the network. Our results suggest that changes depend on the specific program, with Excellent Science being the most affected by BREXIT perturbation. However, the structure of the integrated collaboration network is not significantly affected by BREXIT compared to the variations observed after the random removal of institutions.