Executive Summary

While the Department of Defense’s broad investments in research and development go far beyond what is publicly disclosed, authors affiliated with the DOD do publish papers about their research. These papers reflect a small portion of the DOD’s engagement efforts across an enormous research ecosystem, but they nonetheless offer some insight into the patterns of research collaboration by the DOD.^* By analyzing more than 100,000 papers authored by researchers affiliated with the DOD* in the OpenAlex database, we find:

• Of 100,158 DOD-affiliated papers that we manually reviewed for specific entity affiliation, approximately 86% list an author from a DOD organization (such as the U.S. Army, Naval, or Air Force Research Laboratory), 12% include a DOD-affiliated federally funded research and development center or university affiliated research center (FFRDC/UARC), and 2% have both a DOD and a DOD FFRDC/UARC affiliated author.^†
• Approximately 31% of the papers list a co-author from an institution not affiliated with the DOD. Of those, the large majority come from academia (83%), while much smaller proportions are from non-DOD government research labs, private companies, non-profit institutions, and international organizations.
• The top 10 publishing DOD-affiliated institutions are also the organizations that oversee and manage the majority of basic research funding within the military services (Army, Navy, Air Force), though military medical institutions figure prominently and two DOD educational institutions also make the list, alongside one UARC.
• Five of the top 10 academic institutes co-authoring most frequently with the DOD’s research institutions are home to a DOD-affiliated research center, potentially indicating the importance of established DOD relationships or contractual vehicles outside of purely academic exchanges and grants.
• Of 136,000 DOD-affiliated papers reviewed for international collaborations, the top 5 most frequent international collaborations are, in order, the 27 member states of the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, and Japan. Of these, the European Union is by far the most frequent collaborator, while collaborations with China have declined since 2019.

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^* We include researchers from DOD organizations and research laboratories, as well as researchers at official DOD federally funded research and development centers and university affiliated research centers (FFRDCs/UARCs).

^† Our search returned 136,008 papers, but there were numerous instances where an author institution was listed in multiple ways (i.e., Naval Research Laboratory could be listed as U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Naval Research Lab, NRL, or U.S. NRL). We chose to manually clean and resolve the top 200 institutions authoring papers in our corpus, accounting for 100,158 papers (74% of all papers returned). Our country analysis could include all 136,008 papers because institutions are affiliated with countries in the OpenAlex database in a standard way, which does not require resolution. Future analysis may benefit from entity resolution of the remaining papers in our dataset.