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

Abstract

Our study is one of the first examples of multidimensional and longitudinal disciplinary analysis at the national level based on Crossref data. We present a large-scale quantitative analysis of Ukrainian economic research. This study is not yet another example of research aimed at ranking of local journals, authors or institutions, but rather exploring general tendencies that can be compared to other countries or regions. We study different aspects of Ukrainian economic research output. In particular, the collaborative nature, geographic landscape and some peculiarities of citation statistics are investigated. We have found that Ukrainian economic research is characterized by a comparably small share of co-authored publications, however, it demonstrates the tendency towards more collaborative output. Based on our analysis, we discuss specific and universal features of Ukrainian economic research. The importance of supporting various initiatives aimed at enriching open scholarly metadata is considered. A comprehensive and high-quality meta description of publications is probably the shortest path to a better understanding of national trends, especially for non-English speaking countries. The results of our analysis can be used to better understand Ukrainian economic research and support research policy decisions.

Peculiarities of gender disambiguation and ordering of non-English authors’ names for Economic papers beyond core databases①

“…This paper is a continuation of the authors' previous work (Mryglod et al, 2021), which analyzes Crossref data for publications in Ukrainian journal papers in the field of Economics. The same principle of collecting data is used here, i.e., Crossref publication records related to Ukrainian Economics journals.…”

“…Obviously, this task is a big challenge, especially when dealing with non-Western names (Gomide et al, 2017;Kim et al, 2021;Treeratpituk & Giles, 2012). Since the majority of publications in the Ukrainian Economic discipline are related to local authors (Mryglod et al, 2021) it is natural to find mainly Ukrainian first and last names in our data set. Although such peculiarities as the use of a middle name or a prespecified order of parts in composite names (Gomide et al, 2017;Treeratpituk & Giles, 2012) are not typical for Ukraine, a huge problem of transliteration (e.g., see also Müller et al, 2017) still exists.…”

“…While data analysis at the level of papers is performed (Mryglod et al, 2021), many interesting questions can be put at the level of authors. To give an example, typical individual productivity or authors' collaboration patterns have to be known to set benchmarks for comparing, assessing, or detecting examples of unusual publishing behavior.…”

“…As mentioned before, the gender label of an author is inferred from his/her given name. Since the majority of authors are from Ukraine (Mryglod et al, 2021), Slavic first names are predominantly found in our data set. Besides the list of Slavic names manually labeled by gender, free web resource Genderize ⑨ was partially used to detect gender for non-Slavic names ⑩ .…”

“…This paper contains the results that are part of a more general study (Mryglod et al, 2021), the purpose of which is to perform a large-scale quantitative analysis of the Ukrainian Economics discipline using the publication data predominantly beyond Web of Science and Scopus databases, where currently more than 150 Ukrainian journals are indexed while the National List of recognized scientific journals ② includes almost 1,500 titles. Motivated by the fact that Ukrainian research is still understudied because of its poor representation in core databases (Aksnes & Sivertsen, 2019) (and this is especially true for Social Sciences and Humanities -SSH), we have made an attempt to provide a quantitative portrait of one of Ukrainian SSH disciplines using the Crossref database as an alternative data source.…”