Based on information from open sources, a table has been compiled reflecting the performance of 128 full members of the Russian Academy of Education in the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI). The main results are given in a condensed form and compared with the results of a similar study carried out several years earlier. The conclusions and features of the RSCI as an analytical tool are discussed.
tions of the majority of scientists are not reflected at all (152 persons did not register works in Scopus, and 230 ones weren’t registered by WoS; only 40 and 22 people, respectively had more than 10 publications). The reasons are obvious: the journals in which these authors were published are not represented in the corresponding databases, and the share of their English-language papers is insignificant. Approximately the same situation was observed with the number of citations.
Normative documents for assessing the effectiveness of domestic researchers and scientific organizations unequivocally require along with international databases to use the Russian Science Citation Index. This will be discussed in detail below.
The authors of the study also found it useful to include in the survey of publication
activity some data from the Russian Internet sector: web pages dedicated to scientists,
their personal sites, and mentions in blogs. Internet publications and other forms of
communication via the Internet, if they do not supplant traditional scientific
communications, then substantially complement them. The corresponding data are partially
described in [
As a professional source of information for assessing publication activity, the electronic catalog of the Ushinsky NPB was used. It is in the industry catalog that almost all RAE members are represented (265 out of 279 people). It was assumed that such studies would be repeated. There were all the prerequisites for this. However, life decreed otherwise.
The scientific team of INIM was formed in 1969 on the basis of the laboratory of
the Research Institute of Educational Content and Methods in Chernogolovka (near
Moscow). In 1989, the Center for Comprehensive Identity Formation of the Academy
of Medical Sciences of the USSR was created, which in 2003 was renamed the Center
for Experimental Psychodidactics of the Russian Academy of Education (since 2008
the Institute for Scientific Information and Monitoring). In 2012, after the next
renaming, it was called the Institute of Scientific and Pedagogical Information (INIPI RAE).
In the institute, such information resources as the Open Archive on Pedagogy,
Psychology and Education; the Joint Fund of Electronic Resources for Science and
Education OFERNiO were created and had been supported. And then academic reform
began. According to the Register of Russian Organizations [
It is appropriate to recall here that the history of Russian Academy of Education
dates back to October 6, 1943, when the Council of People's Commissars of the
USSR, by decree No. 1092, approved the project on the organization of the Academy
of Pedagogical Sciences [
On September 27, 2013, Federal Law No. 253 ‘On the Russian Academy of
Sciences’, the reorganization of State Academies of Sciences, and amendments to certain
legislative acts of the Russian Federation was adopted. According to the decree No.
1290 of December 26, 2013, research institutes subordinate to RAE were assigned to
the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia [
Thus, from the above information it follows that to date, neither the laboratory staff that performed mentioned research ten years earlier, nor the INIM Institute itself don’t exist anymore. Ushinsky Library had lost interest in the project.
Therefore, having decided to repeat the study in 2019, the author, taking into account his own physical capabilities, limited himself to the indicators of the full members of RAE as of early April 2019 and to the information from the RSCI.
the RSCI)
As known, the Russian Science Citation Index has been developed since 2005 by the
Scientific Electronic Library. The stated goal of the RSCI is to provide scientific
research with relevant reference and bibliographic information and evaluate the
effectiveness of the activities of research organizations, researchers, the level of scientific
journals, etc. To date, it has become a national-level information and analytical
system containing 12+ million publications by Russian scientists, as well as information
on citing these publications from 6,000+ journals. The RSCI allows to evaluate the
effectiveness of research and to study in detail the statistics of publication activity of
more than 600 thousand Russian scientists and 11 thousand scientific organizations
belonging to all fields of knowledge. In Russia, the RSCI database is one of the main
sources of information for evaluating the effectiveness of research organizations.
Thus, the Decree of Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences No. 201 dated
October 12, 2010 [
According to open sources, primarily RAE and RSCI sites, as of April 2019, the academy unites 128 full members, which account for 17,953 registered publications (an average of 140.26 per person) and 397,230 citations (3103.36). The Appendix contains information on the Hirsch index, the number of publications and the number of citations for each academician. The 2011 publication considered materials from 123 academicians of the Russian Academy of Education. Since then, the Academy has replenished with 49 new members, while 44 people dropped out due to natural causes. Thus, 79 persons are present in both lists.
The RAE website contains information on the dates of birth of the Academy members. Simple calculations show that the average age of academics is 75.5 years, while 97 people (75.8%) reached 70 years old and 10 (7.8%) – 90 years old.
Here are the results of a study of publication activity with a breakdown by age groups. Table 1 in the first column shows the age range, N indicates the size of the corresponding group, P is the average number of publications, C is the average number of citations, H is the average Hirsch index. As noted above, for 79 people there are RSCI data from both studies. It is of some interest to compare their indicators before and now.
And a few more facts about the first study (the values of Hirsch index were not fixed in it). Then 38 scientists did not have publications recorded in the RSCI, and 51 people did not have citations. At the same time, 6 academicians had at least 50 publications, and 13 - at least 100 citations. Note that in 2019 only 3 members of the academy had zeros in the corresponding columns.
The last indicators need some comments. It is noteworthy that, ceteris paribus,
scientists in recent years have 13 times more publications than in their entire previous
lives, and almost 70 times more citations. Let us offer the following considerations as
an explanation. First, as indicated above, the RSCI database began to be formed in
2005, and at first it was replenished rather slowly. But after Presidium of the Higher
Attestation Commission called the availability of scientific periodicals in the RSCI
system as a necessary condition for their inclusion in the Higher Attestation
Commission list [
Secondly, the mentioned Decree No. 201 on the methodology for evaluating the
effectiveness of scientific organizations’ activities played a role. In this connection, we
will also name the governmental decree No. 312 of April 8, 2009 [
The author (not being RAE academician) can illustrate the dynamics of the growth of indicators in the RSCI using his own statistics as an example. In 2014, the system recorded 34 publications with 70 citations and the Hirsch index H = 2 Now these numbers look like this: 185, 749, 13 This growth was achieved mainly due to the inclusion of publications from previous years that were not mentioned at the RSCI before.
The RSCI is not free from internal defects and vulnerable to external manipulations.
In articles [
A few years later, Professor A.L. Fradkov makes a similar judgment: ‘The RSCI
continues to distort scientometric data of scientists and does not try to correct them
systematically. It is impossible to use these data for evaluating scientists, journals and
organizations’ [10, p.5]. And he explains the reasons for this with both objective
difficulties (‘the problem of namesakes is not easy, if solved without the help of the
authors’), and the conscious actions of the leadership (‘RSCI is ready to turn its
system into a garbage can and enter everything there just to pay’. We meet the same
assessments with Professor R.M. Khantemirov: ‘The RSCI only brings harm. This
harm is connected, firstly, with the fact that the base of the RSCI magazines
resembles a huge garbage dump in which it is not easy to find anything worthwhile. And,
secondly, with the fraudulentness of individual authors and journals that took on
rampant proportions when rising up their bibliometric indicators, while the RSCI
leadership indulges in its fundamental unwillingness to counteract’ [12, p.6]. So, according
to him, the Siberian Pedagogical Journal increased its impact factor with the help of
primitive fraud. The scheme is simple: ‘verified’ authors insert dozens of links to
relevant journals into texts of several pages. Note that similar proposals were received
by the author [
In fairness, it must be noted: the requirements of the Ministry of Education and Science to increase the number and citation of publications put scientists in a situation where the desire to comply with ethical standards conflicts with material interest. ‘Often, the bosses themselves, in the pursuit of ratings, force them to violate ethical standards under the threat of demotion, job cuts, dismissal, dissolution of departments and laboratories, etc. Therefore, ethical standards are actually violated under pressure from above’ [11, p.5]. Correcting the situation requires the efforts of both the scientific community, and journal editions, and the political will of the governing bodies.
As for the RSCI, recent positive changes have been evident. Responding to fair
criticism, RSCI experts began to monitor the publication activities of journals and
abstracts of conferences. In April 2017, Mr G.O.Eremenko, the General Director of
eLibrary.Ru, announced at the conference ‘Scientific publication of an international
level: the world practice of preparing and promoting publications’ about the exclusion
of 344 ‘junk’ magazines from the RSCI [
It has been noted more than once that quantitative scientometric indicators should
not be used to evaluate the effectiveness of scientists [
However, the value of the RSCI should not be underestimated. It actually became a national information-analytical system with data on publications and citation of these publications. The created analytical apparatus provides a detailed and visual representation of information. It provides the aforementioned humanities with a more complete and objective picture than WoS and Scopus. And it should be treated not as the main criterion for the quality of scientific work, but as an analysis tool for researchers and experts.
Materials of the report at the XXI All-Russian Scientific Conference ‘Scientific Service on the Internet’ (September 2019) are used in the article. Appendix. Indicators of publication activity of RAE members (P is the number of publications, C is the number of citations, H is the Hirsch index) 2019 2010
Name (in the order of Russian alphabet) 0 6 9 8 1 0 15 5 58 18 0 0 14 5 0 0 0 83 SINENKO Vasily Yakovlevich SLONIMSKY Sergey Mikhailovich SMOLIN Oleg Nikolaevich SMOLYANINOVA Olga Georgievna SOBKIN Vladimir Samuilovich SOVETOV Boris Yakovlevich SOLOMIN Yuri Methodievich STRIKHANOV Mikhail Nikolaevich TAYURSKY Anatoly Ivanovich TIKTINSKY-SHKLOVSKY Victor Markovich TRYAPITSYNA Alla Prokofievna THAKUSHINOV Aslancheriy Kitovich USANOV Vladimir Evgenievich USHAKOVA Tatyana Nikolaevna FARBER Deborah Aronovna FILIPPOV Vladimir Mikhailovich FOKHT-BABUSHKIN Yuri Ulrichovich KHALEEVA Irina Ivanovna TSVETKOVA Larisa Alexandrovna TSIRULNIKOV Anatoly Markovich CHEBYSHEV Nikolay Vasilievich CHISTYAKOVA Svetlana Nikolaevna SHADRIKOV Vladimir Dmitrievich SCHOLAR Lyudmila Valentinovna SCHETININ Mikhail Petrovich SCHUKIN Evgeny Dmitrievich ERDNIEV Pyurvya Muchkaevich ESKINDAROV Mukhadin Abdurakhmanovich YAMBURG Evgeny Sholomovich