Controversial practice of rewarding for publications in national journals

Abstract

The letter to the Editor refers to the controversial research evaluation practice in Ukraine and which is based on counting the number of publications in journals included in selected citation databases, for instance Scopus. I have selected fifty journals in which Ukrainian scholars have written the largest number of articles and reviews for 2015-2019 (Scopus data). I found that 78% of these titles are journals of Ukrainian publishers, or Ukrainian translated journals. Accordingly, current Ukrainian evaluation practice leads to the higher chances of state recognition and funding being received mainly by institutions whose journals are already presented in citation databases, without assessing the scientific impact of research outputs.

Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today’s Academic World

“…On the other hand, researchers are highly encouraged to publish their study results in a timely manner in the best possible journals. Thus, this "publish or perish" attitude, on the one hand, stimulates the productivity of researchers, but, on the other, creates a bias towards quantity, often overlooking quality [2,3,[6][7][8]44,81,163,260,263,[284][285][286][287][288].…”

Universal and specific features of Ukrainian economic research: publication analysis based on Crossref data

“…However, the share of papers by Ukrainian authors indexed in these databases is still small. Interestingly, the majority of such publications can be found again in national journals, see Nazarovets (2020), in spite of the bias towards these editions (see also Sasvari et al (2019)). To give an example, according to WoS data, over 60% of all economic papers where Ukraine is mentioned in the affiliations are published in Ukrainian journals; and this share is greater in Scopus (70%) 2 .…”

Використання Бібліометрії В Соціальних Та Гуманітарних Науках

“…Такий підхід не має на меті охопити публікаційну активність вчених загалом, натомість він дозволяє оцінити представлення саме результатів досліджень, а не просто публікацій вчених. Таким чином, фінансування скеровується саме на проведення наукових досліджень, а не на субсидіювання наукових видань установ, як це зараз часто відбувається в Україні [32]. Водночас цей підхід дозволяє враховувати наукові публікації написані різними мовами, за умови, що обрана мова, канал та аудиторія є відповідними до цілей роботи.…”