Trends in Russian research output indexed in Scopus and Web of Science

Trends are analysed in the annual number of documents published by Russian institutions and indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, giving special attention to the time period starting in the year 2013 in which the Project 5-100 was launched by the Russian Government. Numbers are broken down by document type, publication language, type of source, research discipline, country and source. It is concluded that Russian publication counts strongly depend upon the database used, and upon changes in database coverage, and that one should be cautious when using indicators derived from WoS, and especially from Scopus, as tools in the measurement of research performance and international orientation of the Russian science system.Comment: Author copy of a manuscript accepted for publication in the journal Scientometrics, May 201

Usage of Open Access journals in Russian publications: Web of Science, 2008‑2017

The development of the Open Access (OA) journals system, its advantages, anddisadvantages are discussed. The bibliometric statistics on Russian research performance(RP) were collected from the Science Citation Index – Expanded (SCI-E) for the period 2008-2017. During this period, Russian researchers published about 34,160 articles in Gold OAjournals which share in the total Russian research performance (303,877 articles) accounts for11.2 percent. The usage pattern of Gold OA journals shows a stable growth rate of publications from 7.8% in 2008 up to 13.7% in 2017. Despite the high cost of OA publications, the Russian Academy of Sciences has the highest share (58.6%) of OA papers. We assume that this is an impact of a robust international collaboration of Russian researchers with the US (31%), Germany (29%) and other industrialized countries that cover the cost of collaborative publications. Among the funding organizations that aim to promote Russian participation in the OA system a critical role belongs to the Russian Science Foundation, the Russian Foundation for Basic Research as well as to CNRS (France), the US National Science Foundation and others. The international collaboration and government appropriations for research in universities had substantial impact on citations score: share of Gold OA highly cited articles amounted to 52% out of the Russian total RP. Leading Research Areas (RA in SCI-E) of Gold OA publications turned out to be entirely different compared with a disciplinary structure in total Russian RP. As an example, one of the most critical research areas in the world - "Scientific Technologies" ranked the third place compared to the ninth place in the total Russian RP. Russian scientists widely use the highest quality foreign journals of the Gold OA system indexed in SCI-E, the only Russian OA journal indexed in SCI-E is “Physics of Condensed Matter” which has the highest share of all Russian publications in Gold OA journals

Obituary IRINA V MARSHAKOVA (1941-2019)

status: publishe

Researchers in Ukraine: output, international collaboration, impact, heritage and sex, 1995 to 2021

<p>The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army in February 2022 caused us to look back at Ukrainian science before the war and appraise its strengths and weaknesses, so that after peace and reconstruction it may flourish again and be better attuned to the new era. We examined its publications recorded in the Web of Science (WoS) from 1995 to 2021, and evaluated their quantity and impact, their major fields and Ukraine’s international partners. We also looked at the outputs of the 26 individual oblasts or regions, and the heritage of the researchers in each, Ukrainian or Russian, based on their surnames and given names. Ukrainian scientific output, at about 0.5% of that of the world, was high relative to its wealth, but its impact was rather low, probably because of a lack of contestable funding. It was skewed towards the physical sciences and away from biology and medicine, and so may have led to poorer health in Ukraine than in its geographical neighbours. Its researchers were more likely to be of Ukrainian than Russian heritage the further west they were located. Women were well represented in Ukrainian science and formed more than half the total in most oblasts.</p&gt