Abstract
The factors that impede the accelerated development of innovative research areas in Russian anthropology are considered, among which the author highlights the orientation towards publications in foreign top-rated journals working on the open access business model; support and sponsorship by Russian ministries and foundations of mainly applied research to the detriment of the development of fundamental and innovative areas, which leads to a gap between the languages of expertise and basic science and to stagnation; weak infrastructural support for innovation and a focus on quantitative audits in assessing the performance of academic institutions; and shortcomings in the publication and registration policy of academic publications. Specific measures to correct the current policy in the country in relation to the social disciplines and humanities are considered, and the author suggests to take into consideration the latest trends in the development of publishing, registration, and licensing of academic publications and to reach an optimal balance among support of natural science, social, and humanities-related research.
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I use this concept as a generic one, combining sociocultural, linguistic (the so-called ethnographic folkloristics), and biological (physical) anthropology with all their specializations, including, among others, economic, political, medical, and urban anthropology. The term ethnography designates one of the anthropological methods of field research, built on long-term participant observation. In the history of these disciplines, these terms have been used with other meanings, which have been analyzed many times in works on the history of anthropology. The term ethnology, which, from my point of view, is closely related either to the imperial or to the nationalist projects, is becoming an historicism today and is gradually falling out of use.
In order not to create anti-advertising, I will not give examples of Russian-language journals with such instructions for authors; however, every reader can personally make sure of their availability by looking through a couple of dozens of recommendations for authors on the websites of university journals in the humanities and social sciences.
The struggle of mega-journals for leadership in the publishing market has not begun today: in September 2016, Scientific Reports overtook PlosONE, publishing 1940 articles compared to 1756 of the competitor; in August of the same year, these indicators were 1691 and 1735 articles, respectively [4].
The journal publishes works on human ecology, that is, on the branch of sciences that in some classifications of scientific areas, for example, in the French one, refers to the sciences of man. The genre and standard of the articles published in it, however, coincide to the smallest detail with those adopted in mega-journals of the natural sciences.
This rejection rate is the norm for the traditional journal model, since the economic incentive “more articles, higher profitability” is deliberately avoided in this model, unlike in mega-journals.
It may be worth clarifying here that it is not peoples but people who are friends, and relations develop not between “ethnic groups” but between ordinary citizens, and also that none of the so-called “ethnic conflicts” either in their origins and causes (often banal economic) or in their driving forces can be considered ethnic, if only because, as a rule, people of different ethnicities participate in conflicting groups—a fact that is usually ignored when describing such conflicts.
Of course, in societies where kinship and clan ties are strong, mobilization during a conflict relies on them, but even here members of the same families and clans may have different interests, so that essentialist interpretations of the events of mobilization in such cases are more likely a factor involved in the production of the conflict rather than the language of its analysis.
Some Russian grants aimed at supporting research require quarterly reporting in complicated forms, while, for example, individual grants from the well-known foundation for supporting anthropological research Wenner Gren do not require reports at all; scientists who have received such a grant must simply provide a standard mention of the supporting foundation in their publications.
To talk about world-class achievements, it is necessary to name the criteria by which such achievements can be determined with a certain degree of reliability. In my opinion, ordinary publications in leading anthropological journals with a high impact factor cannot be considered world class, except for those that have become widely discussed and cited and have really influenced the development of specific areas of anthropological research around the world. Their fame should extend beyond the community of specialists in the region—former Sovietologists and anthropologists who conduct their research in Russia or the CIS countries. Such specialists usually monitor the work of Russian researchers but use them only as mere sources to supplement the materials they have collected and ignore the concepts or theories that they put forward. Consequently, the achievements of the world level include research, concepts, theories, new trends, and discoveries that have received wide resonance in world anthropology. In my opinion, the works of L.S. Vygodskii and A.R. Luria (their ideas are used in cognitive and cross-cultural anthropology), M.M. Bakhtin and V.Ya. Propp (structuralism, folkloristics, structural linguistics), Yu.V. Knorozov (paleography, anthropological linguistics), and A.V. Chayanov (economic anthropology and peasant studies) reached this level and became part of the legacy of world anthropology. Over the last half century, only Russian paleoanthropologists have managed to distinguish themselves, while other anthropological specializations have not demonstrated such a level of achievement.
An analysis of the developing trends and subdisciplines of anthropological research for the Russian case is presented in [9].
For example, Chinese universities and research centers have stopped supporting scientific publications as bonuses to researchers for each article since February 2020 to stop the publication race and allow scientists to focus on improving the quality of research rather than on the number of published papers [10].
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Translated by B. Alekseev
Sergei Valer’evich Sokolovskiy, Dr. Sci. (Hist.), is Chief Researcher at IEA RAS and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Etnograficheskoe Obozrenie (Ethnographic Review).
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Sokolovskiy, S.V. Publication Policy and Current Issues in the Development of Anthropological Research in Russia. Her. Russ. Acad. Sci. 92, 88–95 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1134/S1019331622010130
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1134/S1019331622010130