Stakes are higher, risk is lower: Citation distributions are more equal in high quality journals

Psychology is a discipline standing at the crossroads of hard and social sciences. Therefore it is especially interesting to study bibliometric characteristics of psychology journals. We also take two adjacent disciplines, neurosciences and sociology. One is closer to hard sciences, another is a social science. We study not the journal citedness itself (impact factor etc.) but the citation distribution across papers within journals. This is, so to say, "indicators of the second order" which measure the digression from the journal's average of the citations received by individual papers. As is shown, such information about journals may also help authors to correct their publication strategies.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures. Published in STI 2018 Proceedings: https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/6522

Universities vs. research institutes? overcoming the Soviet legacy of higher education and research

Universities and non-university research institutes have been recognised as two key sectors producing research globally. The Soviet model of research organisation included a large network of research institutes, affiliated with the USSR Academy of Sciences and republican academies, as well as industry research institutes, affiliated with sectoral ministries. Universities played a minor role in research. Post-Soviet higher education and research systems went through reforms in the last three decades which led to changes in the patterns of knowledge production. This study offers an overview of the reforms and a bibliometric analysis of 319410 publications in journals indexed in the Web of Science database to examine how selected post-Soviet countries have overcome the Soviet legacy of organisational separation of higher education and research. While universities now produce the bulk of research output in selected countries, in the majority of national contexts, Academies of Sciences continue to be important players in research

Examining the generalizability of research findings from archival data

This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching the original reports together with 55% of tests in different spans of years and 40% of tests in novel geographies. Some original findings were associated with multiple new tests. Reproducibility was the best predictor of generalizability—for the findings that proved directly reproducible, 84% emerged in other available time periods and 57% emerged in other geographies. Overall, only limited empirical evidence emerged for context sensitivity. In a forecasting survey, independent scientists were able to anticipate which effects would find support in tests in new samples

Antecedents of organizational commitment among faculty: an exploratory study

Faculty are the main asset of a university and determine its success. The attitudes of faculty toward their institution play an especially important role in the academic profession. This study examines the specific antecedents of affective, normative and continuance commitment of faculty to their university. This study is an online survey of 317 faculty of Russian higher education institutions. The results of the regression analysis showed that being an undergraduate inbred (ie, working at the university from which one graduated) predicted affective and normative commitment toward the university, while having a post at another higher education institution predicted only affective commitment. Also, faculty who work at several universities have lower levels of emotional attachment to the primary university

The impact of Russia-Ukraine conflict on international migration of Russian‐affiliated researchers

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has had a significant impact on international migration patterns, including a significant exodus of Russian-affiliated researchers. This study examines the scale, disciplinary impact, and geographic shifts of this migration wave by analyzing data from the Scopus database. Using changes in the most frequent country of affiliation as a proxy for migration, the results show a substantial decline in the net migration rate of Russian researchers from 2022 to 2024. Russia has been losing about 0.8% of its active researchers annually over this period. This brain drain wave affects almost all research fields. The most affected disciplines include Physics and Astronomy, Computer Science, and Mathematics, while Dentistry and Health Professions experienced comparatively smaller declines. Geographically, traditional academic destinations such as Germany, the United States, and Switzerland have absorbed the majority of emigrating researchers, while non-traditional destinations, such as Armenia, the United Arab Emirates, and Kazakhstan, are also becoming important. However, large academic systems such as China and India have not seen significant increases. The findings underscore that this unprecedented brain drain will have both short- and long-term consequences for Russian academia and global science

Antecedents of organizational commitment among faculty: an exploratory study

Faculty are the main asset of a university and determine its success. The attitudes of faculty toward their institution play an especially important role in the academic profession. This study examines the specific antecedents of affective, normative and continuance commitment of faculty to their university. This study is an online survey of 317 faculty of Russian higher education institutions. The results of the regression analysis showed that being an undergraduate inbred (ie, working at the university from which one graduated) predicted affective and normative commitment toward the university, while having a post at another higher education institution predicted only affective commitment. Also, faculty who work at several universities have lower levels of emotional attachment to the primary university