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Scientometric research in Russia: impact of science policy changes

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Abstract

After the fall of the USSR in 1990, there was a steady stagnation of Russian science for 15 years. The restoration started in 2006 after the government introduced new science policies with funds depending on the research assessment. As it follows from this paper, the trends of publication activity in Russia have changed after that. On the other hand, the number of annual scientometric publications in Russia increased sharply from dozens to hundreds in the period of 2006–2014. In this paper, we consider whether these facts are related or not. We investigated the dynamics and structure of scientometric articles flow and revealed how it is related to the stages of Russian Science reformation. In the final part, we made a brief review of the most cited issues including country research specialization, low citing, and Matthew index. The aim of this paper is to make a review of new Russian scientometrics landscape and to explain the reasons why it has changed.

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Notes

  1. Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) is a bibliographic database of scientific publications in Russian. It accumulates more than 20 million publications of Russian authors, as well as information about citing these publications from more than 5000 Russian journals (only 154 of them presented in Web of Science in 2014).

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledges Mikhail Tsentalovich and Dmitri Tsentalovich for their help with text revision. The main idea of the article and draft data were previously discussed by the authors in Russian language (Guskov 2015b).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The State Public Scientific Technological Library of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science, Voshod Str. 15, Novosibirsk, Russia

    Andrey Guskov & Irina Selivanova

  2. Institute of Computational Technologies of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Science, Acad. Lavrentjev avenue 6, Novosibirsk, Russia

    Andrey Guskov

  3. Novosibirsk State University, Pirogova Str. 2, Novosibirsk, Russia

    Andrey Guskov & Irina Selivanova

  4. Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, Koptug ave. 3, Novosibirsk, Russia

    Denis Kosyakov

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  1. Andrey Guskov
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  2. Denis Kosyakov
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  3. Irina Selivanova
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Correspondence to Andrey Guskov.

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Guskov, A., Kosyakov, D. & Selivanova, I. Scientometric research in Russia: impact of science policy changes. Scientometrics 107, 287–303 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1876-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-1876-7

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