Abstract
It is rather easy to identify the leading universities in a country, there are different established methods and indicators of excellence. Generally, it is more challenging to find ‘the second best’ universities which have the potential to become leaders, ‘the firsts’. In Russia, such an attempt has been made. The program of ‘Pillar Universities’ was realized in 2016–2020, in two stages. This paper analyzes the initial stage of the project and its outcomes. We aim to investigate how the program affected the output of the universities from the bibliometric point of view. The results, obtained by bibliometric methods, are encouraging. There is an increase in publication output above the Russia’s average growth. Multidisciplinarity, domestic and international collaboration also increase. Those universities which had no papers in the top journals started publishing their research there. The overall effect of the ‘pillar project’ is found to be positive. Bibliometrics is widely used for assessing higher education institutions and is free from local peculiarities. This allows using the observations of this study in a broader context.
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Notes
World university rankings also recognize this problem. As a rule, they give exact ranks to several dozen institutions, and then group them as non-discriminated sets (201–250, 251–300 etc.). The same “non-all-discriminative” approach is used for complex journals rankings (Subochev et al. 2018).
Sometimes also called in English “Flagship”, which is a reference to the US system of Flagship Universities (National Science Board 2012, p. 26).
Some previous studies reported that size of a unit, whether the department (Golden and Carstensen 1992) or research group (Seglen and Aksnes 2000) is poorly related, if at all, to per capita article production. In the case of Italian universities, the same conclusion for the majority of disciplines is drawn by Abramo et al. (2012), with their specific definition of ‘productivity’ (see also bibliography there). But all these results should rather be contrary to ours—in that case total production should be strongly correlated to the number of authors in a unit.
When the paper was already finished, the news has come that Volgograd State Technical University is the first among Pillars-2016 who entered Top-1000 of the THE World University Ranking.
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Acknowledgements
The present study is a substantially extended version of a paper presented at the 23rd International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, Leiden (The Netherlands), 12–14 September 2018 (Lisitskaya et al. 2018).We thank two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments.
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Tatiana Lisitskaya: conceptualization, methodology, data collection and analysis, writing — reviewing and editing.
Pavel Taranov: conceptualization, methodology, data collection and analysis, writing — reviewing and editing.
Ekaterina Ugnich: conceptualization, methodology, data collection and analysis, writing — reviewing and editing.
Vladimir Pislyakov: conceptualization, methodology, data analysis, writing — original draft, reviewing and editing.
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Appendix. Institutions merged into pillar universities of the first stage
Appendix. Institutions merged into pillar universities of the first stage
City, pillar university | Merged universities |
|---|---|
Kirov = Vyatka State University | Vyatka State University |
Vyatka State University of Humanities | |
Kostroma = Kostroma State University | Kostroma State Technological University |
Kostroma State University | |
Krasnoyarsk = Reshetnev Siberian State University of Science and Technology | Reshetnev Siberian State Aerospace University |
Siberian State Technological University | |
Omsk = Omsk State Technical University | Omsk State Technical University |
Omsk State University of Design and Technology | |
Orel = Orel State University | Orel State University |
Prioksky State University | |
Rostov = Don State Technical University | Don State Technical University |
Rostov State University of Civil Engineering | |
Samara = Samara State Technical University | Samara State Technical University |
Samara State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering | |
Tyumen = Tyumen Industrial University | Tyumen State Oil and Gas University |
Tyumen State University of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering | |
Ufa = Ufa State Petroleum Technological University | Ufa State Petroleum Technological University |
Ufa State University of Economics and Service | |
Volgograd = Volgograd State Technical University | Volgograd State Technical University |
Volgograd State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering | |
Voronezh = Voronezh State Technical University | Voronezh State Technical University |
Voronezh State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering |
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Lisitskaya, T., Taranov, P., Ugnich, E. et al. Pillar Universities in Russia: Bibliometrics of ‘the second best’. Qual Quant 58, 365–383 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-023-01645-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-023-01645-4