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ISSN 1019-3316, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 2016, Vol. 86, No. 4, pp. 314–321. © Pleiades Publishing, Ltd., 2016.
Original Russian Text © V.V. Ivanov, V.A. Markusova, L.E. Mindeli, 2016, published in Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, 2016, Vol. 86, No. 7, pp. 611–619.
Government Investments and the Publishing Activity of Higher
Educational Institutions: Bibliometric Analysis
V. V. Ivanov
a
, V. A. Markusova
b
, and L. E. Mindeli
c
*
a
Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
b
All-Russian Institute for Scientific and Technical Information, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
c
Institute for the Study of Science, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia
e-mail: ivanov@presidium.ras.ru; markusova@viniti.ru; L.Mindeli@issras.ru
Received October 15, 2015
Abstract—Analyzing the results of bibliometric analysis of more than 175 000 domestic articles indexed in the
Web of Science Core Collection over 2010–2014, the authors identified an increase both in the number of
articles prepared at the Russian Academy of Sciences and in the number of articles associated with the higher
education sector. It is shown that the growth of the scientific productivity of higher educational institutions,
especially 15 universities within the Project 5-100, is largely due to their strengthened scientific collaboration
with the Russian Academy of Sciences. This article reflects general trends in the development of the global
and domestic practice of assessing scientific activity and science-based decisions made to finance various sci-
entists and research teams. The authors fully share the opinion and principles of the founders of the Leiden
Manifesto and call on science administrators to use bibliometric indicators as tools of information support for
expert procedures.
Keywords: bibliometrics, scientific collaboration, impact factor, institutions of higher education, Russian
Academy of Sciences, scientific productivity, Web of Science, Journal Citation Reports.
DOI: 10.1134/S1019331616040031
The year 2014 marked 50 years since the world’s
first issue of the Science Citation Index (SCI). Its cre-
ator Dr. E. Garfield in an article published in Science
in 1955 came forward with the idea of using scientific
references as a tool of information search [1] (the his-
tory of the SCI creation was detailed in [2]). The reg-
ular SCI issue aroused great interest in the scientific
community, initiating many proposals and develop-
ments in scientometrics. Scientists realized that SCI
arrays were the most valuable source of information
for sociology and the history of science and for study-
ing scientific communication networks, as well as a
tool of assessing the performance of scientific
research. The use of the citation method served as the
basis for the formation of scientometrics, or, as it is
called today, bibliometrics, as a new scientific disci-
pline. A major factor in the genesis and development
of bibliometrics has been the realization that biblio-
metric statistics, acting as an indicator of scientific
research performance, is able to ensure the efficient
spending of taxpayer money.
Bibliometric indicators cannot replace peer
reviews; however, they are a powerful information
tool. A widely used bibliometric indicator is scientific
productivity (SP), i.e., the number of articles pub-
lished by a country, organization, research team, or
individual researcher and indexed in the global infor-
mation resource Web of Science Core Collection
(WoSСС), owned by Thomson Reuters. The dynam-
ics of this indicator is used for comparative analysis of
the level of development of the disciplinary structure
of science and technology in various countries.
Country-specific and regional differentiation of
global science. The map of global science has under-
gone colossal changes over the past 25 years owing to
the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the end of the
Cold War, and the rapid growth of the Asian-Pacific
economies. A large number of bibliometric studies
consider these transformations [3–9]. Serious changes
are also observed in Eastern European countries,
which seek their place in the system of international
division of scientific labor [10]. On the basis of analy-
sis of the WoS scientific productivity over the past
15 years, countries that previously were members of
the Eastern bloc showed a dependence of reforms in
* Vladimir Viktorovich Ivanov, Dr. Sci. (Econ.), is a deputy presi-
dent of the RAS. Valentina Aleksandrovna Markusova is head of
a department of the All-Russian Institute for Scientific and
Technical Information (RAS VINITI). RAS Corresponding
Member Levan Elizbarovich Mindeli is director of the RAS
Institute for the Study of Science (RAS ISS).
From the Researcher’s Notebook