Trends in Russian research output in post-Soviet era

Abstract

Recently, the Russian government has ordered evaluation and reform of the basic research system. As a consequence, the number of research staff at the Russian Academy of Sciences will be reduced by 20% by 2007. The basis for research evaluation and institute budgeting will be bibliometric indicators. In view of these changes we look at the Russian publication output and argue that(1) publication output and citedness have to be considered in relation to the level of expenditure on R&D;(2) bibliometric indicators depend strongly on the database used (ISI's databases are biased) and their interpretation can be confusing; better coverage of Russian publications or a Russian Science Citation Index are needed. Also, research results are communicated in more ways than paper publications.(3) policy makers have misused ISI statistics to demonstrate "a low level" of Russian R&D. Our paper is a part of a project designed to trace R&D development in a transition economy and knowledge transfer from basic research to innovation. Results of our project shed light on science policy and the social issues due to the indiscriminate introduction of quantitative indicators.

Factors Affecting Bibliometric Indicators of Scientific Quality

“…After the dissolution of the Soviet Union its successor, the Russian Federation has obviously failed to modernize it science which structure still reflects science of the 20th century, not science of the 21st century which is characteristically dominated by medical and life sciences (Adams and King 2010). The relative output of Russian scientists has remained basically on the same level but the impact of their papers has even decreased (Markusova, Jansz, Libkind, Libkind, and Varshavsky 2009). Surprisingly, Armenia outperformed other former Communist bloc countries in terms of the mean impact and proportion of highly cited papers.…”

Science system path-dependencies and their influences: nanotechnology research in Russia

“…The science funding system remained highly centralised, and universities maintained mainly teaching specialisation until mid 2000s (Graham and Dezhina 2008 ). The domination of RAS is maintained across most fields and disciplines of Russian science, with an exception of clinical medicine, in terms of the volume of outputs and collected citations (Markusova et al 2009a , b ; Mokhnacheva and Kharybina 2011 ). Some authors equate RAS research outputs with overall research outputs of Russia (Markusova et al 2009a , b ).…”

Publications from Serbia in the Science Citation Index Expanded: a bibliometric analysis

“…Furthermore, trends in a certain scientific field or the importance of the researcher, journal, scientific conference, scientific institution or a certain country within the world science community can be determined based on bibliometric indicators (Wang et al 2010). Moreover, analyses of the scientific-research production of countries belonging to all continents have been studied using bibliometric indicators for example Russia (Markusova et al 2009), the Netherlands (Moed et al 1995), Estonia (Allik 2008), China (Fu et al 2011;Fu and Ho 2013), Brazil (Leta and Chaimovich 2002), the Republic of South African (Jeenah and Pouris 2008), and Morocco (Bouabid and Martin 2009). This paper analyses journal publications contributed by Serbian researchers in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) database from 2006 to 2013.…”