Rinz - Russian Science Citation Index. Oscillation base: how Russian journals got into the RSCI database What is included in the core of the journal

The end of 2015 was marked by an important event for domestic science: on December 17, the division for scientific research and intellectual property of Thomson Reuters, and the scientific electronic library eLibrary.ru announced the placement of a database of the best scientific journals in Russia - Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) on the platform Web of Science (WoS). RSCI is a separate database from the Web of Science Core Collection, but is fully integrated with the WoS search platform.

The RSCI database includes 652 Russian journals, carefully selected from the collection of the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI). Integration of the core of the RSCI collection with the world-famous WoS platform will significantly increase the accessibility of Russian journals in the international scientific arena. From now on, tens of millions of WoS users from different parts of the world will have direct access to RSCI, and Russian research will be displayed along with research from other countries. Compared to the set of Russian journals already included in the WoS Core Collection, the RSCI database more fully represents publications in the field of engineering, medical, agricultural, humanities and social sciences.

Oleg Utkin, head of Thomson Reuters IP & Science in Russia, said at a press conference: “We are honored to host the Russian Science Citation Index database of the best Russian scientific journals on the Web of Science platform and to familiarize the international scientific community with the results of Russian researchers.” .

As Pavel Kasyanov, an expert on scientometrics at Thomson Reuters in Russia, said, to date, even English-language publications in Russian scientific journals indexed in the RSCI are rarely cited, which is apparently due to the low availability of the eLibrary.ru web service for the world scientific community. communities. Translating at least the titles, keywords and abstracts of scientific articles into English and placing them in a database integrated with WoS will overcome this barrier. In addition, the new database will greatly facilitate the search for scientific information for Russian scientists themselves. In December 2015, free test access to the RSCI database on the WoS platform will be provided. Perhaps the grace period will be extended to January 2016. Negotiations are underway at the level of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation to provide access to the new database to all scientific organizations in Russia.

The second most important function of the created RSCI database is to improve the quality of Russian scientific publications and bring them to the level of international standards. According to statistics provided by Gennady Eremenko (head of the Scientific Electronic Library eLibrary.ru), in Russia there are now about 400 thousand scientists (research workers with at least one publication over the past 5 years). The RSCI database has currently included 8.7 million publications and more than 5,000 Russian journals; this list is constantly updated. In 2015, about 800 thousand publications indexed by the RSCI were published. At the same time, RSCI does not make any high-quality selection of indexed works. Therefore, a key stage in creating the RSCI database was the selection of the best journals across the entire spectrum of scientific fields.

The assessment and careful selection of Russian scientific journals was carried out by the Working Group based on the results of a multi-level examination. Members of the Working Group headed the relevant thematic (according to the subject headings of Web of Science) expert councils. It included:

• A. I. Grigoriev (chairman of the working group), vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, chairman of the Scientific Publishing Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences, scientific director of the research center of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences (biological and other natural sciences - interdisciplinary journals)
• A. A. Baranov, Director of the Scientific Center for Children's Health (medical and health sciences)
• L. M. Gokhberg, First Vice-Rector of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Director of the Institute of Statistical Research and Economics of Knowledge of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Social Sciences and Humanities - social and humanities)
• G. O. Eremenko, General Director of the National Electronic Library (NEL) (advisory council on bibliometrics)
• E. N. Kablov, President of the Association of State Scientific Centers, General Director of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise State Scientific Center "All-Russian Institute of Aviation Materials" (engineering and technical sciences)
• V.V. Kozlov, Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the Mathematical Institute named after. V. A. Steklov of the Russian Academy of Sciences (mathematical, computer and information sciences)
• Yu. F. Lachuga, Academician-Secretary of the Department of Agricultural Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences (agricultural sciences)
• N.V. Sobolev, senior researcher at the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy named after. V. S. Sobolev RAS (geological sciences)
• A. R. Khokhlov, Vice-Rector of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosova (Physical sciences - physical sciences and Chemical sciences - chemical sciences)
• A. Ya. Nazarenko, NISO RAS, scientific secretary of the working group.

Leaders of thematic areas formed expert councils, involving leading scientists and representatives of various scientific organizations (specialized departments and research centers of the Russian Academy of Sciences, federal and research universities, state research centers, etc.) in the examination. It is worth especially noting that the expert councils included not only metropolitan specialists, but also representatives of the regions, for example, scientists from St. Petersburg, the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the SB RAS, the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, etc.

The list of journals indexed by the RSCI and their bibliometric indicators (more than 30 indicators presented in the electronic library eLibrary.ru) were used as primary information. Then the publications were independently assessed at meetings of expert councils and the Working Group, as well as by the method of public examination of journals by leading Russian scientists.

Public peer review has become a significant innovation in the system of evaluating journals indexed by Thomson Reuters services (for example, journals included in the Web of Science Core Collection are evaluated only by an expert council located in Philadelphia, USA). During the public examination, 10% of scientists with the highest bibliometric indicators were selected for each scientific area. Each expert assessed journals within the scope of their field, distributing scientific publications into four corresponding quality levels. In total, 12,800 expert questionnaires and 240,000 journal evaluations were submitted, and 2,800 expert comments were compiled to justify the evaluation or clarify the thematic heading of the journal. An interesting result of the work carried out was the identity of the assessments received by the journals from the Working Group and during the public examination. However, when making the final decision on inclusion (or exclusion) of a journal in the RSCI database, priority was given to the opinion of the Working Group.

At the beginning of work on creating the RSCI database, it was planned to select the 1000 best Russian scientific journals. However, during the examination, the working group found it possible to include only 652 journals in the database. Fully electronic publications were selected on the same basis as traditional paper ones. When selecting journals, no quotas were provided for various scientific fields. Many publications were selected that publish works in Russian (in particular, on Russian cultural studies, where publication in foreign languages ​​is impractical). At the same time, the collection of RSCI journals differs from the RSCI in the direction of reducing the share of multidisciplinary publications and journals in the humanities and social sciences. It is also worth noting that not all Russian journals included in the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus are included in the RSCI database.

Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Anatoly Ivanovich Grigoriev has repeatedly mentioned that the work of experts will continue in close cooperation with Thomson Reuters and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. During the press conference, the need to constantly update the list of journals included in the RSCI database was repeatedly mentioned (at least once a year). Recommendations are being developed for journals wishing to be included in both the RSCI database and the Web of Science Core Collection. New journals appearing in Russia are monitored: if such journals maintain a high level for 1-2 years, they will be included in the RSCI database. There is also the possibility of excluding journals from RSCI if their quality declines.

Leonid Gokhberg, first vice-rector of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, spoke in more detail about the negative factors preventing the journal from entering the RSCI database. Among them are the lack of reviews of published works, paid publication of works bypassing peer review, the lack of adequate lists of cited literature in articles, lowered requirements of the journal’s editorial board for the works of young researchers, as well as the use of various mechanisms for “cheating” bibliometric indicators. It was specifically mentioned that analytical and purely practical publications (especially in the field of social sciences and humanities) cannot be considered scientific, and the corresponding publications will not be included in the RSCI database.

Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexey Removich Khokhlov separately raised the question of the correctness of the list of journals of the Higher Attestation Commission (HAC), which contains more than 2000 publications, in the light of the results of expert assessment of Russian scientific journals. Participants in the press conference actively supported the need to revise the list of publications in which publications are counted towards the defense of candidate and doctoral dissertations. Leonid Gokhberg stated the need to give the RSCI database an official legal status and to be guided by it when assessing the effectiveness of scientists, teachers, considering applications for scientific grants, etc. The special value of the RSCI journal list is that it is not formed by legislation “from above”, but “grows from below” based on the opinion of the scientific community.

In conclusion, members of the Working Group expressed hope that the creation of a new database of Russian scientific journals and its integration with the Web of Science platform (Thomson Reuters) will contribute to an adequate assessment of the work of Russian scientists in government agencies and in society, and will also contribute to the establishment of international relations of Russia not only in science, but also in other fields.

Why was the decision made to exclude a group of journals from the RSCI?

The Russian Science Citation Index was created not only as a national register of publications by Russian scientists, but also as a tool for assessing scientific activity. That is, the RSCI has two main tasks: a) collecting from all sources in a single database information about all publications of Russian scientists, and b) calculating statistical indicators for assessing the publication activity of scientists and scientific organizations based on the citation of publications.

The RSCI copes quite successfully with solving the first problem. Now more than 6 thousand Russian journals are indexed there. The total number of publications by Russian scientists in the database exceeded 11 million, and every year one and a half million new publications are added (of which approximately 800 thousand are publications for the last year, the rest are archival). Of these 800 thousand, approximately 450 thousand are publications in scientific journals, the rest are monographs, articles in collections, conference proceedings, patents, dissertations, etc.

But in recent years, more and more difficulties have arisen in solving the second problem. This is due to the rapid growth in the number of journals published in Russia, which in words position themselves as peer-reviewed scientific publications, but in reality simply provide paid services for the publication of the author’s works without any peer review. Anything can be published in such a journal, including any anti-scientific nonsense, since there is no input quality control of publications from a scientific point of view. There is no control over the reasonableness and validity of citations in articles. For example, you can easily make at least a hundred references in each article to your previous works or the works of your co-authors, even if they are not thematically related to the content of this work and are not mentioned at all in the text. Increasing your bibliometric indicators in this way is, as they say, a matter of technique.

To combat this problem, the RSCI proposes to use various modifications of indicators, including those taking into account self-citation, citation by co-authors, contract citation, etc., but the methods for calculating them are becoming more and more complex and using them in practice is not always advisable. And not everything can be corrected with indicators alone.

The saddest thing in this story is that the metastases of such unscrupulous practices have begun to affect quite decent journals, the founders of which are universities and scientific organizations. Moreover, many scientists and teachers have already begun to be quite tolerant of publications in such journals. This does not cause any indignation or rejection among their colleagues.

You can easily predict the further development of the situation if you do nothing. The share of non-peer-reviewed publications in the RSCI will increase, which will lead to the fact that the indicators calculated from the RSCI database will no longer be able to be used to evaluate scientific activity, since, due to artificial manipulations, they will no longer reflect the real picture of the scientific significance of scientists and scientific organizations and magazines. As a result, the RSCI will be excluded from all regulatory documents related to the assessment and monitoring of scientific activities. It will be replaced either by the recently formed core of the RSCI, or in general only by international scientific citation databases. Then those who today protest against the exclusion from the RSCI of unscrupulous publications in which they had the imprudence to publish will really have serious problems. After all, many of them have no publications at all in prestigious international journals.

To avoid such a pessimistic scenario, it is necessary to introduce restrictions on the inclusion of non-peer-reviewed publications in the RSCI and exclude journals that have already been included there that do not meet the criteria of scientific and publishing ethics. The fact that this will be done was first announced a year ago at the conference “International Scientific Publishing - 2016: Solving the Problems of Publishing Ethics, Reviewing and Preparation of Publications.” During the year, work was carried out to analyze and evaluate journals indexed in the RSCI for their compliance with generally accepted criteria for a scientific peer-reviewed publication. As a result of this analysis, they were selected, which were recently excluded from the RSCI.

The practice of excluding journals from science citation databases is not new. Journals are excluded from both Web of Science and Scopus. For example, those that do not meet the rules of publishing ethics, artificially inflate their indicators, or are of too low quality have recently been removed from Scopus.

How are journals excluded from the RSCI technically, and what happens to the performance of scientists who published in excluded journals?

Technically, the magazine is not going away. Licensing agreements with publishers are not terminated, moreover, the publisher can, if desired, continue to provide information about new issues. But all articles from excluded journals and citations from them are no longer taken into account when calculating bibliometric indicators in the RSCI. To assess publication activity on the platform, the site now has three different levels:

1) RSCI core. This includes all publications in journals currently indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus and RSCI (Russian Science Citation Index on the Web of Science platform) databases. In addition, the core will include the best monographs and proceedings of the most respected scientific conferences, selected based on strict peer review. The RSCI core is recommended for assessing the highest quality component of the array of publications by Russian scientists.

2) RSCI. After clearing out unscrupulous publications, this will include only publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, as well as non-journal publications that meet the requirements of publishing and scientific ethics. It is recommended for analyzing publication activity in all scientific areas, including those where the level of domestic research does not yet reach the world level.

3) Scientific electronic library. Various publications that are related to scientific activity, but are not scientific in the strict sense of the word, can be additionally posted here, including abstract, popular science, information and socio-political magazines, as well as magazines that cannot be classified as peer-reviewed. These publications do not participate in the statistical assessment of scientific activity in the RSCI.

Accordingly, the main bibliometric indicators (number of publications, number of citations and Hirsch index) are now calculated separately for each category, which makes it possible to compare them and understand the publications in which sources they are formed. All these indicators are presented on the page for analyzing the scientist’s publication activity. In the lists of author publications and citations, you can now also display publications or links separately for each category.

Why couldn’t it have been possible to leave the already loaded issues of excluded journals in the RSCI or to exclude only articles by individual authors who were inflating their indicators?

The logic behind the operation of scientific citation databases is based on the fact that they do not select individual publications. They are physically unable to do this with such input streams of publications. The selection takes place at the level of scientific journals, and the evaluation of individual articles is carried out by the editors of scientific journals. Journals are a kind of distributed specialized centers for examining incoming manuscripts and selecting the highest quality and scientifically significant works for publication. If this most important function of the editorial office of a scientific journal stops working, the entire coherent system of bibliometric assessment in scientific citation databases collapses. Therefore, the global practice is that entire journals are added to the database and no longer indexed, rather than individual articles. It is assumed that if experts have selected a journal for inclusion in indexing, then they trust all publications in this journal, since the editors of the journal guarantee their quality at an acceptable level.

All journals excluded from the RSCI at this stage, from the very beginning of their publication, carried out their activities with obvious violations of scientific publishing ethics, therefore all their issues were removed from the RSCI. Is this fair? If we analyze the composition of the authors who published articles in journals excluded from the RSCI, it turns out that 80% of them published no more than three articles in these journals, and half - one article at all. If these authors have other publications, then one or two articles will not have much impact on their performance. At the same time, there is a category of authors for whom the exclusion of these journals will be much more noticeable - about 4 thousand scientists have published 10 or more articles in them. There are also antiheroes here, who have 100 or more publications and several thousand citations in the excluded journals. A detailed analysis of the publication activity of these scientists confirms their use of publications in these journals for the purpose of artificially inflating their indicators. When an author has more than 500 publications in 2016, and these publications already have more than 1,400 citations, and at the same time the core of the RSCI is zero, and the H-index is approaching 70, then this speaks not just of a massive violation of publication ethics, but also in general about the loss of common sense in the pursuit of indicators.

Now let's assume that all these publications would remain in the RSCI and imagine two scientists with a high H-index. The first has published throughout his life in highly rated scientific journals, and his H-index truly reflects his real scientific level. The second one followed the path of least resistance and in a couple of years built up the same H-index for himself through publications in dubious journals and proceedings of correspondence conferences. It turns out that with a formal approach, both of these scientists equally apply for the same positions, titles, bonuses, grants, etc. Is this fair? The interests of which of these scientists should be supported by the RSCI in this situation? It seems to us that the answer is obvious.

How to determine whether a journal is peer-reviewed and whether it will be excluded from the RSCI in the future?

The main criteria by which one can determine whether a journal is peer-reviewed and whether it meets the requirements of the Russian Science Citation Index are given in sufficient detail in. Many similar recommendations can be found on the Internet. First of all, you need to rely on common sense and not fall for dubious advertising that promises everything quickly, cheaply and with a guaranteed result. If you still have doubts, ask more experienced colleagues whether this journal is authoritative in your scientific field.

Yes, you can try to retract an article from the journal, revise it and send it to one of the peer-reviewed publications. In this case, it is necessary to indicate that the article was published earlier, but was withdrawn and revised. This will allow you to avoid later problems with text duplication when checking for incorrect borrowing.

Will work continue to clear the RSCI of unscrupulous publications and how?

This work is very important and will certainly continue. According to our estimates, among the six thousand journals indexed in the RSCI, at least 1000 journals do not conduct any review of incoming manuscripts at all, that is, only a third have been excluded from the RSCI so far. Also, numerous correspondence conferences and collective monographs will be excluded from the RSCI - very dubious genres of scientific publications that have recently become widespread in Russia, and in fact are a quick way to publish an article without any peer review.

How will new journals be included in the RSCI now?

Now there will no longer be automatic inclusion of new journals in the RSCI. Each journal will go through an internal evaluation system. If a new journal is created by a reputable publishing house that already has journals in the RSCI, and is not involved in any stories related to violations of publishing ethics, then it will begin to be indexed from the first issue.

If the publishing house is new or there were questions about its previous publications, then the journal may begin to post issues on the website, but they will not be immediately taken into account in the RSCI.

It is possible to significantly reduce the time it takes to consider the inclusion of a journal in the RSCI if the journal provides texts of reviews of them along with descriptions of articles. These reviews will be posted on the article description page. This will not only confirm the fact of reviewing articles, but also evaluate the quality of this review.

Can a journal already indexed in the RSCI switch to a model with open posting of reviews?

Yes it is possible. To do this, the journal publisher must finalize agreements with publication authors and reviewers, obtaining their consent to post reviews in the public domain. What might be the interest of authors and reviewers in this?

First, it may be important for the author, as well as for the journal, to have public evidence of peer review of their work. Secondly, posting reviews can become an incentive, a kind of catalyst for colleagues to discuss the results of their work and search for new directions for further research.

For a reviewer, open reviews are essentially a publication of the results of his hard work. And if the editors choose the option of disclosing information about the reviewer of this article, then this also means respect from colleagues and recognition of his qualifications by the scientific community. Experienced editors know that some reviewers write very interesting and detailed reviews that are useful not only for the author of the manuscript under review. Their publication may provide a new perspective on the interpretation of the results obtained and new approaches to solving the problems raised in the study.

How will the process of posting open reviews be technically organized?

Review texts are posted on the publication description page. Access to them is open to all scientists registered in the Science Index system. Along with the text of the review, the editors provide information about the reviewer (full name and ID of the review author) and the date of the review. The editors of the journal themselves determine whether this information will be publicly available or not.

The editors also decide independently whether all reviews are opened or only the most interesting ones will be shown. If the decision to publish an article was made by the editorial board independently, without the involvement of external experts, then the text of this decision may be provided instead of a review. It is also permitted to publish not the full text of the review, but individual excerpts from it. The review may be adjusted or compiled by the editors from several reviews. In addition, in some cases it may be of interest to publish the authors' responses to reviews.

Scientists registered in the Science Index system can also write their reviews and evaluate the level of this work after its publication. In addition, they are given the opportunity to discuss the results of their work and discuss with the authors of the publication.

How can I retract an article if it has already been published in a journal?

Withdrawal of an article (retraction) is carried out upon an official request from the editors of the journal. In this case, the initiator of retraction can be either the team of authors or the editors themselves. The most common causes of retraction are:

Detection of plagiarism in a publication;

Duplication of an article in several publications;

Detection of falsifications in the work (for example, manipulation of experimental data);

The discovery of serious errors in the work (for example, incorrect interpretation of results), which calls into question its scientific value.

To retract an article, the editors must indicate the reason for retraction (in case of detection of plagiarism, indicating the sources of borrowing), as well as the date of retraction. Examples of retracted articles can be viewed or. Retracted articles and references from them are excluded from the RSCI and are not included in the calculation of indicators.

Scientific Electronic Library Project e LIBRARY started in 1999 with providing Russian scientists with electronic access to leading foreign scientific publications, and 10 years ago began working with Russian-language publications. Today e LIBRARY is the world's largest resource for periodicals in Russian. We invited the General Director of the Scientific Research Institute to talk about the priorities and prospects for developmentElectronic library Gennady Eremenko.

- Gennady, in what main directions is the resource being developed? What are the statistics, users, services?

e LIBRARY Platform. RU unites a number of projects related in one way or another to scientific information. Recently, the main development has been in three directions, which are quite intertwined and mutually complement and enrich each other.

The first direction is, in fact, the Scientific Electronic Library. The goal of this project, which really started it all, is the aggregation of full-text scientific information. These are primarily Russian scientific journals. There are already more than 4.7 thousand of them. A significant part of them (more than 3.7 thousand, i.e. almost 80%) are publicly available, the rest are distributed by subscription. In what mode is the magazine placed on the platform? eLIBRARY. RU , the publisher himself decides. Some journals are presented on the resource without full texts, only in the form of bibliographic descriptions and annotations in the RSCI (about 900 more publications), while the share of such journals is gradually decreasing.

The second direction of development is, of course, the RSCI. This is a non-profit project that was launched in 2006 with financial support from the Russian Ministry of Education and Science. The goal of this project is to create a comprehensive bibliographic database of publications of Russian scientists and links to these publications, as well as to calculate, based on this information, various bibliometric indicators that can be used to assess the scientific activities of Russian scientists and research organizations.

And finally, the third direction is the Science Index information and analytical system, which is essentially an analytical superstructure over the RSCI and adds new capabilities for various categories of users. This is already a commercial project, through which we can not only maintain the RSCI in open access, but also develop further, creating new useful services for Russian scientists.

- How do you assess the results of the year in general, what factors had the greatest impact on the results? In what key is the development of databases of scientific periodicals in Russia and abroad, how is the market changing? What are its national characteristics?

If we talk about scientific journals, then we can probably already say that we have reached the level where e LIBRARY covers almost all Russian scientific periodicals, at least all of its noteworthy parts. That is, the phrase “if a journal is not in the Scientific Electronic Library or in the RSCI, then it simply does not exist” is becoming more and more relevant. This does not mean that the growth in the number of magazines represented on the platform has stopped. If only because every year about 250–300 new magazines are born in the country, which also appear on eLIBRARY. RU ( rice. 1).

So, lately we have been thinking more and more not about how to attract the remaining journals to the platform (this process goes on by itself - the gravitational effect of the existing collection and the desire of journals to get into the RSCI are at work), but about how to really limit this collection decent magazines. It is no secret that in the last few years many magazines have begun to appear that outwardly disguise themselves very well as scientific, but in fact, upon closer examination, have nothing to do with science. The purpose of their creation is to simply increase bibliometric indicators for a certain category of scientists, usually for a monetary reward. In such a “scientific” journal you can easily find, for example, articles where the lists of cited literature contain several dozen references that are not even mentioned in the text of the article itself, and may have nothing to do with the topic of this article at all.

The puzzling thing is that there seems to be a good demand for such services, and if there is a demand, there is a supply. The reason for this is also clear - the universal and, most importantly, very formal use of bibliometric indicators to evaluate the scientific activities of scientists and scientific organizations, including material incentives for achieving certain values ​​of these indicators. Instead of focusing on the quality of scientific research, employees of scientific organizations are trying by hook or by crook to improve these indicators. As a result, we are forced to spend more and more time identifying and removing such pseudoscientific publications, and, of course, this does not help the image of the RSCI.

This tendency can be effectively combated if we provide conditions under which it will simply be pointless to create such journals, organize all sorts of correspondence conferences and publish non-peer-reviewed collections of articles, i.e. level the demand for such publications. We are already taking certain steps in this direction, although not everything depends on us. The launch last year of the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) project, which distinguishes a collection of the best scientific journals from all Russian journals indexed in the RSCI, is one of these steps. Based on this collection, as well as articles by Russian scientists published in journals indexed in Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus , the so-called “RSCI core” is defined. We have already begun to separately calculate our bibliometric indicators for this core. In contrast to the indicators calculated for the entire RSCI database, which rather characterize the gross publication activity of scientists and organizations, indicators based on the RSCI core provide an assessment of its highest quality part. By the way, it is planned to add other types of publications to the RSCI core (in particular, monographs, conference proceedings), selecting the best from what is available in the RSCI.

The second serious step that I would like to talk about concerns the entire RSCI database. We have prepared a new regulation for the placement of journals in the RSCI, which provides for annual monitoring of the quality of indexed journals, identification of journals that cheat indicators, and their removal from the database. We now have powerful analytical tools that make it easy to find such logs and such patterns. Of course, expert assessment will also be used. Thus, we are talking about the fact that the RSCI will not index all journals that have called themselves scientific and are ready to supply data, but only journals that do not violate generally accepted rules of scientific ethics.

Here it is dangerous, as they say, “to throw out the baby with the bathwater.” It is clear that there are many journals that are aimed at students, graduate students, and young scientists. Of course, articles in such journals do not reach the level of authoritative international journals. Nevertheless, the existence of these publications is not only justified, but also necessary from the point of view of education and professional training of new generations of Russian scientists. The main thing is that these journals operate according to the same rules as their more established colleagues. Scientific reviewing in publications of this level plays, perhaps, an even more important role, since it also has an educational function, helping from the very beginning to accustom young scientists to the fact that publishing poorly designed scientific hack is simply “not comme il faut.”

As a result of these steps, publishing articles in pseudo-journals and collections of proceedings of pseudo-conferences will become simply meaningless, since these publications, most likely, simply will not get into the RSCI. Well, such journals certainly will not be included in the core of the RSCI, since publications there undergo a thorough expert assessment. Therefore, one can hope that such magazines will naturally die out on their own.

- What are the main trends in the development of the RSCI, the composition of information, the dynamics of growth in the number of Russian journals, participants? How does the RSCI differ from other databases?

RSCI is indeed very different from such well-known and authoritative scientific citation databases as Web of Science and Scopus . Firstly, according to the principle of formation. Web of Science and Scopus select the best journals from around the world and include them entirely in the database. The RSCI has a different task - to analyze the publication activity of Russian scientists. Therefore, the RSCI collects all publications by Russian authors, regardless of their scientific level and where they were published. There are already more than 9 million such publications.

The second feature of the RSCI is the sources of publications taken into account. Some still believe that the resource processes only Russian scientific journals. In fact, almost all possible types of scientific publications are loaded and processed into the RSCI. These are monographs, collections of scientific articles, conference proceedings, dissertations, patents, scientific reports, preprints, etc. The RSCI also takes into account articles by Russian authors in foreign journals, which the RSCI does not independently index. These articles are purchased annually from the Scopus database. All this allows us to more comprehensively and objectively analyze the publication activity of Russian scientists in various scientific fields and evaluate the level of their research.

RSCI is also unique in that on a single platform and in a single search engine there is not only a bibliographic citation database, but also a huge full-text resource eLIBRARY. RU . This integration provides new opportunities for both projects. For example, library readers can use navigation through citing or cited publications, and RSCI users can not limit themselves to the scientometric indicators of a scientist, but familiarize themselves in detail with his articles, especially since the full texts of most of them are in the public domain.

The integration of two projects allowed us to add another unique opportunity to the RSCI last year. If we have the full text of the publication, then we show the so-called reference context in the cited literature lists, i.e. a small fragment of text that mentions this cited work. This most often allows you to understand why such a link was made in this article. After all, citation can be different, including even negative.

Well, the last thing I would like to mention, if we are talking about the distinctive features of the RSCI, is that the resource is in the public domain. This means that all Russian scientists, without exception, can not only use its search system, but also receive a full set of scientometric indicators calculated in the RSCI for all authors, organizations, journals, etc. The high cost of access to foreign scientific citation databases, of course, somewhat complicates their use on a national scale.

- Tell us more about the Science Index information and analytical system. What are the main services for different categories of participants in this project: authors, publishers, organizations?

Science Index is also a unique project that distinguishes RSCI from Web of Science and Scopus. In addition to additional analytical capabilities, it effectively solves a problem that all vendors of such large databases struggle with. This is the difficulty of identifying and normalizing information. Each author of an article, each affiliation, each link must be uniquely identified, i.e. tied to a specific scientist, scientific organization or publication in a database. Considering that there are a lot of spelling options, abbreviations, translations, link formats, and simply errors in the source data, it is completely impossible to do this automatically, and manual identification is so expensive that even such large international companies cannot afford it, like Thomson Reuters or Elsevier.

The only, in our opinion, real way to solve this problem is the widespread involvement of scientists themselves, as well as representatives of scientific organizations and publishing houses, in the work of correcting, clarifying and identifying their data (i.e. data about their publications and citations). And this is exactly the path we took when we launched the Science Index system.

Now I can definitely say that this approach has paid off. There are more and more scientists who not only registered with the Science Index and received a unique author code (SPIN code), but also made it a rule to go to elibrary.ru once every few months and check their lists of publications and citations. In total, more than 370 thousand Russian scientists have already registered in the system. Considering that, according to our data, there are about 410 thousand researchers in the country (this is the number of unique authors who have at least one publication in the RSCI over the past five years), 90% of Russian scientists already have their profiles in the Science Index system.

Registered authors can independently identify their publications or links, which for some reason are not automatically associated with a given scientist. That is, it turns out that the quality of information, and therefore the bibliometric indicators of a scientist, also depend on his own activity. This is especially important for authors with common surnames, when it is quite difficult for the system to make a decision on assigning a given publication to one or another of the namesakes.

The next stage in the development of Science Index was the launch of a system aimed at scientific organizations. There are already much more opportunities there, including representatives of organizations can add publications of their employees who for some reason were not included in the RSCI. Each such publication is checked by our operators and only after that is included in the RSCI.

Unique to the system is also the ability to analyze publication activity at the level of not only the entire organization, but also its structural divisions or individual scientists. The system also includes a large section with infographics, where you can visually analyze the publication activity of an organization, including comparing it with other organizations within individual reference groups. Number of Russian scientific organizations - subscribersThere are already more than 800 of this service.

Coming soon - Science Index for publishers. There are even more possibilities, but we will talk about them when we launch this system. There's not long to wait.

- Share the results of the project with Thomson Reuters to place 1 thousand Russian scientific journals on the Web of Science platform. From open sources it became known that only 652 journals were included in the project. Tell us what criteria were used to select and what are the requirements for inclusion of new journals in WoS.

It was originally planned that the database Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI ) the Web of Science platform can include up to 1 thousand Russian journals (rice. 2). However, we did not set ourselves the goal of necessarily reaching this level immediately. The expert assessment showed that only 652 journals are now ready for inclusion in this database. Of course, there are many more publications that almost satisfy the necessary requirements and, accordingly, can be added at the next stages of the project.

The main criterion for evaluating the journal was the quality of scientific articles published in it. There were no presets for experts. Even such factors as the age of the journal, its popularity, its inclusion in the list of the Higher Attestation Commission, the Web of Science or Scopus databases were not decisive. That is why the list included not only the oldest and most authoritative Russian journals, but also some relatively young publications, individual highly specialized journals, which may not be well known to most scientists, but are leading in their narrow field. Conversely, some journals, even those included in WoS and Scopus, are not included in RSCI.

Also, no quotas were established in advance for individual areas of scientific knowledge. As a result, it turned out that the proportion of selected journals in those scientific areas that are better developed in the country turned out to be higher (mainly natural sciences). And vice versa, in those areas that seem weaker (for example, social, agricultural, medical sciences), despite the large number of journals in these areas in the RSCI, the share of journals selected in the RSCI was smaller. However, if we compare the thematic distribution of Russian journals in WoS and RSCI, then in RSCI journals in various scientific fields are represented much more evenly.

The expert assessment of the journals was carried out in several stages. At the first stage, bibliometric indicators were calculated for all Russian journals represented in the RSCI. This was a whole set of criteria that made it possible to comprehensively assess the level of a journal based on bibliometric data.

At the second stage, a broad public examination of journals in various scientific fields was carried out. On the site eLIBRARY. RU experts filled out questionnaires in which each journal on the list in a certain scientific area should be assigned one of the levels reflecting its quality, from the expert’s point of view.

To participate in the peer review, the scientist had to be registered in the Science Index system as the author of scientific publications, have an academic degree of candidate or doctor of science and the total number of citations of publications for five years (2009–2013) of at least a certain threshold, which differs for different scientific fields . The threshold values ​​were determined in such a way as to select the top 10% of authors according to this indicator in each scientific area, i.e. ensure equal proportional representation of scientists in different fields of knowledge. In total, invitations to take part in the examination were sent to more than 30 thousand scientists.

The results of the bibliometric assessment and public examination were transferred to working groups of experts for their consideration and consideration in the process of making the final decision on including the journal in RSCI.

Journals will be monitored annually for evaluation and inclusion in the RSCI database, and the list of included journals is likely to gradually expand. At the same time, the opposite situation is also possible, when a journal found, for example, in violation of scientific ethics, in particular in the use of various schemes to cheat bibliometric indicators, will be excluded from the database.

Finally, I would like to note that the inclusion of a journal in the RSCI list does not automatically mean that all its issues are included in the Web of Science. Many publications lack some of the information necessary to prepare data in accordance with the requirements of the Web of Science, not to mention the fact that some journals lack some issues, especially archival ones. There are also many problems with the design of lists of cited literature in articles. Therefore, we, together with the editors of the selected journals, still have a lot of work to do to bring the quality of information on these journals in the RSCI to an acceptable level.

- It is obvious that, despite the measures taken by the Russian Ministry of Education and Science, the publication activity of Russian scientists is still extremely low. It will take a lot of time for the infrastructure, language culture, and system of motivating scientists to publish to be formed. However, often articles by Russian researchers are “not visible” in databases due to incorrect formatting of metadata. What intellectual methods does your service offer for a more accurate assessment of a scientist’s scientific activity and analysis of his publication activity?

The problem is most likely not in the low publication activity of Russian scientists. It seems to me that due to various administrative mechanisms, motivation is now quite sufficient. Judge for yourself. Every year, Russian scientists produce more than 900 thousand scientific publications of various types, of which almost 600 thousand are articles in scientific journals. Moreover, this is not all, but only those that are uploaded to the RSCI. And of this flow only 40 thousand, i.e. no more than 7% are included in the authoritative international databases Web of Science and Scopus.

So the problem is not how to stimulate general publication activity, but how to increase the number of high-quality scientific publications. Maybe there is no need to require a scientist to write a new article every month, publishing still “raw” or incomplete results, but it is better to do it once a year, but it will be really serious, good work. And now it’s reaching the point of absurdity: scientific organizations are required to plan for the number of publications for several years in advance.

That the publications of Russian scientists in international databases are simply not visible and in fact there are much more of them there is a myth with which the leadership and some of our colleagues are trying to console themselves. Well, yes, our scientists do not always indicate their Russian affiliation, especially when they work in foreign countries. There are problems with identifying articles in some Russian journals, including the problem of accounting for translated versions. But this does not fundamentally change the picture: there are few really good publications.

This does not mean that attention should not be paid to the correct formatting of articles and links to them. And this is a task not only for the authors of publications. It is quite difficult for them, especially young scientists, to understand the various formats for formatting references in lists of cited literature. Control and correction of these data is a direct function of the editors of scientific journals, which they often, unfortunately, neglect .

- Taking into account the difficult economic situation and the peculiarities of the dissemination of scientific content, many discussions arise in the professional community regarding the promotion and sale of journals: by subscription or by providing articles in open access. Is it possible to achieve a balance and find optimal models for distributing scientific content, so that publishers can monetize their services, and scientists can more actively promote their research among colleagues?

I may have a slightly conservative point of view, but I am a proponent of the classic magazine distribution model. This model has one important advantage - it is self-regulating. Readers, by subscribing to a magazine or paying for articles, are actually voting with their money for its quality. It is unlikely that anyone will buy a magazine that is of no interest. Accordingly, the magazine, having earned this money, gets the opportunity for its further development and improvement of quality. At the same time, the number of subscribers grows, the publication earns even more money, etc. All that is required of the magazine is to publish quality articles. If he cannot do this, then everything works exactly the opposite, and the magazine gradually dies.

In the case when we turn the diagram over, i.e. It is not the consumer of information who pays for publication, but the author or some third party (for example, an organization or foundation), then natural selection in the publishing environment is violated. Agree, it is even morally more difficult to refuse an author who brought money to the editorial office and not publish his article, not to mention the fact that he most likely will not come to this journal next time. As a result, the publishing house turns, in fact, into just a printing house that prints (or posts on the Internet) everything that the authors bring. The author, in turn, begins to view the publication of an article as a kind of service provided to him by the publishing house for money.

The scheme with the author paying for the publication of an article in open access works well only in reputable international publishing houses that value their reputation and for which the publication of individual journals or selected articles in open access is not the main distribution scheme. We can see what this leads to in Russia from the huge number of frankly weak Russian journals that are posted in the public domain simply because announcing a subscription to them is pointless: no one will subscribe anyway.

Sometimes you hear the opinion that making a journal open access dramatically increases its visibility and, accordingly, its citation rate. Yes, it increases, but the visibility of a magazine is not at all the same as its relevance. If the articles in a journal are weak, no one will cite them, even if it is posted on a thousand sites on the Internet.

Regarding e LIBRARY. RU , then we equally respect any decision of the publisher regarding the choice of distribution scheme for their magazines and technically support all options. The only thing we usually advise journals that are distributed by subscription is to transfer the archives to open access after a year. This has practically no effect on subscriptions, but can contribute to the growth of citations of the journal.

- A huge amount of information is freely available, Open Access Publishing services are actively promoted. How does the emergence of such services affect your projects?

Open access services, for all their apparent attractiveness for information consumers, also have a downside. It is known that free cheese can only be found in a mousetrap. You have to pay for everything, and the price in this case is our time. Yes, there is a huge amount of information and it is open, but how much time should we spend to find in this bottomless space what we really need, given that this space mostly consists of information garbage? And how not to miss something important?

To do something worthwhile, be it a magazine or a service, you need some funds in any case. Of course, with the current level of development of information technology, technically publishing an article on a website or in an open archive is not particularly difficult. And this may even turn out to be a quite decent article. Or maybe not. Nobody will give guarantees. The key point that distinguishes a scientific journal is the peer review of all published articles. Peer review is a kind of self-defense of the scientific community from the flow of pseudoscientific, shoddy, stolen works. It creates a kind of trust zone for scientists, highlighting information that can be trusted and worth spending precious time studying.

Reviewing is the most important, but not the only function of a scientific publishing house. There are a number of other operations that are necessary in order to present a scientific article to the scientific community in the most convenient and familiar form for it. This includes high-quality layout, translation, proofreading, scientific editing, reference design, compliance with terminology accepted in the field, presentation style, and much more. All this requires time, appropriate specialists and, ultimately, money, which in any case must be taken from somewhere.

In the open access model, this money cannot be taken from the subscriber, so either it is not there at all, or it is taken from the author of the publication, from whom in our realities you also cannot take much. Therefore, most of the above-mentioned functions are simply omitted, which naturally affects the quality of such magazines. That is why the Russian scientific community has a very dismissive attitude towards Russian open access journals.

- How, in your opinion, will the system of dissemination of scientific information change in the coming years? What new effective models will appear, what role will recommendation and expert services play? Is it possible to monetize such projects?

I don't think anything will change radically in the coming years. A major revolution in this area has already occurred. Recommendation services are now a really fashionable trend, but it seems to me that they are poorly applicable for scientific information. We can even advise a stranger what new movie he should watch, what book he should read, or what hotel he should stay in, and with a fairly high probability it will be useful to him. In the field of scientific interests, the likelihood of such a hit is much less, since modern scientific activity is characterized by a narrow specialization of scientists. For such a system to work effectively, it requires widespread participation of scientists, which is very difficult to organize.

Nevertheless, some projects may turn out to be quite successful, so you should not be afraid and experiment in this direction. As an example, I can cite the public examination of Russian scientific journals, which we carried out last year with the aim of selecting the best publications for inclusion in the RSCI database. About 30 thousand of the most authoritative Russian scientists in all scientific fields were involved in this assessment. We received about 13 thousand questionnaires, 240 thousand individual assessments for journals and 2.8 thousand text comments from experts with the reasoning for the assessment or clarification of thematic headings of the journal. And this despite the fact that the survey took place at the end of summer, when most scientists are usually on vacation. So the result is quite positive.

But monetization of such services in the field of scientific information will be more difficult. It is usually carried out by motivating the visitor to make additional purchases of goods or services sold on the site. In this case, it could be the sale of individual articles, books or magazines. However, in our experience and that of other scientific information providers, individual subscribers account for only a small proportion of total sales. The main subscription goes either centrally through consortia or through scientific organizations. And work with such subscribers is based on completely different principles.

- Another trend is the development of scientific social networks and communities and the “attachment” of various services to them (for example, the Mendeley project). Are you developing similar areas of communication?

Yes, we have such a project in the works. But this will not be a social network, but rather a professional one. There are already enough social networks where you can create a community and communicate. The problem is that these networks act like a drug for many. People are starting to spend more and more time on correspondence in such networks, and this prevents them from concentrating on work. We would not want any projects to appear on the elibrary.ru website, which is positioned as a professional website for scientists, that distract people from their work. For the same reason, we have virtually no annoying advertising on our website. It will be another matter if these are some useful services that help scientists jointly solve problems that arise in the course of their professional activities.

There are good prerequisites for creating such a network. This, in particular, is the fact that almost all Russian scientists are already registered in the Science Index system and we know quite a lot about them: what scientific direction they work in, how successful they are, what they read, who they quote, etc. On this basis, we already have a system for searching and selecting experts to solve various problems related to the assessment of scientific activities (projects, grants, etc.).

- How do you build interaction with suppliers of non-scientific journals? What new services do you offer to content providers?

The portal elibrary.ru was originally created as a repository of exclusively scientific information, so we simply do not accept non-scientific journals. We don't even have popular science literature. Another thing is that among those journals that are already published and call themselves scientific, not all can actually be considered as such. Still, the main feature of a scientific journal is the review of incoming manuscripts, i.e. the presence of an expert function that allows you to select only worthy scientific works. But this is precisely what many magazines have problems with. More precisely, we have problems with such journals, because checking the fact of peer review of articles is very problematic. That is, it is difficult to cut off such journals at the entrance based on formal criteria. This requires peer review and bibliometric evaluation of articles in each journal. But in order to carry them out, you first need to have these articles in the database. That is why we initially accept all journals into the RSCI, and only then determine their real quality.

Among the new services for content providers, we can note the possibility of posting in the NEB not only scientific journals, but also various non-periodical publications (monographs, dissertations, conference proceedings, collections of articles, etc.). This opportunity is now provided not only to scientific publishing houses, but also to the authors of these publications themselves.

We also need to mention various integration services. We have developed an API for automatically obtaining information from the RSCI, including obtaining current bibliometric indicators. This opportunity is already being used by a number of our partners (expert organizations, manufacturers of databases containing scientific information, EBS, large publishing houses, universities, etc.).

- What are the strategies in relations with domestic and foreign clients? What new options and services for libraries have appeared/will appear on your platform in the near future?

We also try not to forget about our subscribers. Among the opportunities that have appeared recently, we can highlight a bonus option for organizations that simultaneously subscribe to the Science Index system and full-text journals in the NEB. These organizations can create their own organizational structure in the Science Index system and assign employees to their departments. Accordingly, these employees have the opportunity to work with full-text resources on elibrary.ru not only from the organization’s computers, but also from home or any other place. This is really very convenient, since many scientists search, study literature, and write articles at home.

The statistics system is also being finalized, which will allow subscriber organizations to obtain a more detailed understanding of which journals are more in demand, which divisions of the organization are more active in terms of using available information resources, etc.

The beginning of the “Russian Science Citation Index” project can be considered in 2005, when a Russian mechanism for assessing and analyzing scientific publications was developed on the site of the scientific electronic library. The goal of the project was to create an objective indicator of the citation rate of domestic scientists. The number of publications before the start of the Russian index that were included in international rankings was only 10 of all published ones.

What is RSCI

The Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) system is a domestic database of citations of fundamental, academic and applied research.

Currently, the database archive contains more than 12 million different publications; over 600 thousand scientists, researchers, and teachers are actively publishing their works.

11 thousand scientific organizations related to all branches of science are registered on the elibrary.ru platform. At least 3,000 new texts are added to the RSCI list every day.

The basis of the citation system is the indexing of all printed and electronic publications published in the specialized literature. Each publication of the RSCI list has an abstract index, which includes:

• output,
• author of the text,
• meaningful words,
• area/areas of study,
• brief description of the article,
• list of sources.

The RSCI system solves a number of important scientific problems:

1. analyze and evaluate citations of domestic scientists, professors, and researchers;
2. create a single complete list of scientific publications, an authoritative independent database;
3. to create a multifunctional search system, a navigation system for articles, publications, and specialized journals.

The Russian Citation Index is the main citation system in Russia today, which includes all information about various studies (monographs, methodological manuals, conference collections, articles, dissertations). The RSCI database is freely available. Official site.

Figure 1 – Main page of the RSCI website

The difference between the Higher Attestation Commission and the RSCI

Some people confuse the list of journals of the Higher Attestation Commission and the list of the Russian index, which is fundamentally wrong. Journalism included in the scientific database and the Higher Attestation Commission are two separate catalogues.
The scientific database register has been expanded to include the most authoritative periodicals in Russia.

The citation index itself is a tool that makes it possible to find out the level of periodicals, objective criteria of its importance and popularity (impact factor).

Every scientist or research organization strives for high citation rates in the RSCI, as an assessment of effectiveness.

But applicants for an academic degree need to publish their articles only in those journals that are approved by the Higher Attestation Commission.

The list of the certification commission is much smaller. A journal included in the Russian citation database is not automatically included in the Higher Attestation Commission.

RSCI impact factor

Impact factor (IF) is a quantitative indicator of the value of a journal, its importance and significance. There are different approaches to calculating the IF: for two, three, five previous years. Many organizations define the factor in their own developed ways.

The impact factor of Russian journals is determined using the classical method:

IF = a/b, where

a is the number of cited journal articles for the previous conditional period (2 or 5 years),
b – the number of all publications for the same conditional period.

The Russian Citation Index calculates two sets of IFs:

• in the first, the factor for b is all links in all sources, including texts without clear authorship;
• in the second IF, only original articles from domestic journals are taken to calculate b.

What is the RSCI core

In 2015, an agreement was concluded with Web of Science that a Russian database of cited articles would be hosted on their site. This includes the most successful domestic publications. The best journals, as well as individual articles included in the international database, form the Core of the Russian citation index.
The development stage assumed that the “core” would include the TOP 1000 domestic journals. This TOP is not static; every year, journals that meet a high level are selected.

Today the core consists of almost 700 copies of periodicals

The difference between the domestic and foreign citation index is that the foreign index counts only “its” publications, while the Russian science citation index has access to all information.
If a graduate student, young scientist or teacher needs an article not for “extras”, but for a serious argument in the defense of a candidate’s thesis or a deep immersion in science, then it is important to strive to publish the work in the TOP.

How to get to the RSCI

Registration in the electronic library RSCI elibrary ru will be required if necessary:

1. gain access to all available materials in the electronic library;
2. manage site navigation (save search history, customize the panel, etc.);
3. create a personal selection of texts, publications, collections;
4. Log in to the site, post the publication as its author.

To get into the search engine, you must first register as a user. This will make it possible to log in and access the entire RSCI database.

The Russian Science Citation Index can be used as an assessment tool after undergoing secondary registration, already as an author.

It will be possible to enter the database to use new services (publish or index your own article, calculate the index) no earlier than in a week (this is how long the process of checking your profile and confirming registration lasts).

Scientific journals RSCI

The electronic scientific library of the RSCI includes almost 7,000 titles. Of these on the elibrary site:

• 5600 publications are presented in full,
• 4800 journals have open free access.

The RSCI list is regularly updated and expanded.
There is an index on the site - “search for magazines”. Various parameters allow you to quickly find the publication you are looking for (Fig. 2).

Figure 2 – Catalog of journals included in the database

The RSCI list includes a variety of periodicals, which includes (Fig. 3):

1. highly specialized (from astronomy to linguistics),
2. multidisciplinary journals (technical, humanities or in all areas of science).

Figure 3 – Thematic list of journals

RSCI Conference

Since 2011, scientific conferences of the RSCI have been held, at which various aspects of scientific activity are studied. On the official website you can find information about both past events and upcoming ones.

Some universities hold similar events, based on the results of which the most relevant materials, outstanding presentations, and conclusions are compiled into a general collection. The publisher of such collections strives to be indexed in the scientific citation database, but the publications do not always undergo strict verification.

Publishing the results of a conference of a university in the RSCI is a criterion of high quality

Publication in the RSCI collection allows young scientists to increase their citation index. That is why not only professionals and narrow specialists, but also university teachers and graduate students who are passionate about science strive to get into them.

E-library for authors

• through regular user registration, after which fill out an additional form (personal profile);
• through the publishing house or organization where the author works or teaches (Fig. 4).

Figure 4 – Registration in the RSCI

1. Enter “manually” a complete abstract description of the published manuscript.
2. Use a template indicating a link to an article already published on another site (if information about it is already in the database).
3. Add an article using the DOI code (if the journal uses this identification method). The article search procedure, in this case, is automatic.

How to find out an author's citation index

Determining the number of cited articles is an important factor for a scientist. The RSCI citation index is calculated automatically by the electronic library server. How to find out the RSCI index:

• through the search “My citations” in your personal profile,
• through the “Author Index”, after filling out the full name column.

To find out your H-index or your colleague's H-index, follow the author search link. Enter your last name or other known search parameters. At the output, you will immediately be able to see information about the citation of the author.

Next to the citation status of publications there is a colored icon; by clicking on it you can get detailed detailed information.

SCIENCE INDEX system

In 2011, an analytical part was added to the general database - the SCIENCE INDEX system for organizations and publishing houses. The institution enters into an agreement, after which it can:

1. add not only a new publication, but also monographs, results and conclusions of your own conferences, announcements of upcoming events at your institution;
2. manage the entire set of tools necessary for analyzing and evaluating publications (both at the level of the organization and department, and at the level of the individual scientist);
3. carry out the most detailed analysis and calculation of scientometric indicators (individual and complex);
4. independent control over publication activity.

The RSCI system requires additional registration, which is possible only after a thorough check. If the publications of the author or publication are approved by the Higher Attestation Commission, then they will be able to do this without difficulty. A separate section in the personal user section contains the paragraph “register in the system as the author of publications” (Fig. 5).

When concluding a contract, a scientific organization specifies in the contract which of its employees will coordinate work with the citation index.

Author ID and SPIN code of the author

• Author ID
• SPIN code

An individual AuthorID is assigned to each registered author. This personal number allows you to identify a person in the database, take part in scientific events, apply for grants, and publish in specialized periodicals.

ID search:

1. login to the author’s personal page,
2. The ID indicator will be under the full name.

With the introduction of the SCIENCE INDEX system, it became possible to independently analyze publication activities (clarify lists, check publications, calculate the index).

This system requires additional registration, after which the author is assigned a SPIN code.

The SPIN code definition can also be found in the personal profile, where its publication activity is reflected.

The RSCI covers an impressive volume of scientific publications by domestic authors. All forecasts indicate that in the near future the RSCI database of the Russian Science Citation Index will only increase. An important difference from international systems is that you can register on the domestic platform for free and have access to almost the entire citation database. The main functions of the Russian parameter are the analysis and evaluation of publications by Russian scientists, as well as the source and search system of all specialized periodicals.

Members of the working group for compiling the RSCI (Russian Science Citation Index) rating, Gennady Eremenko and Andrey Nazarenko, tell us specifically for the site how to distinguish a “good” journal from a “bad” one and what is better - citations or expert assessment.

The number of scientific journals published in the world is constantly growing. Russia in this regard is also no exception. Figure 1 shows a graph of changes in the number of scientific journals published in Russia. The growth in the number of journals accelerated in the 1990s and now amounts to about 300 new journals annually. That is, in fact, in Russia, on average, a new scientific periodical appears every day.

This growth is explained, among other things, by objective reasons characteristic of the development of world science: the emergence of new areas of research, fragmentation of areas with the allocation of more specialized journals, the formation of new scientific schools, an increase in the number of scientists, etc. There are, however, indirect reasons that provoke an increase in the number of scientific journals and the number of scientific publications in the world. This is the widespread use of bibliometric indicators to evaluate scientific activity, stimulating scientists to publish more often, and sometimes, unfortunately, to the detriment of the quality of the work itself.

Figure 1. Dynamics of changes in the number of journals published in the Russian Federation (according to RSCI data as of July 2016)

Currently, more than 6,000 journals are published in Russia, which can conditionally be classified as scientific. Conditionally, since this includes not only purely scientific publications, but also scientific-practical, scientific-industrial, scientific-educational, socio-political, and popular science publications. One of the main distinguishing features of a scientific journal is the review of incoming manuscripts. Most journals indexed in the RSCI claim to have such peer review. However, this is very difficult to verify. In addition, reviewing also varies. Often, full-fledged reviewing with the involvement of several external experts is replaced by internal reviewing, when articles for publication are selected by the editorial board or only by the editor-in-chief. There are also journals that, while declaring peer review, actually do not do it at all.

It should be noted that the RSCI does not conduct any entrance selection of scientific journals based on their quality. The task of the RSCI is to provide the most complete coverage of the entire publication flow of Russian scientists, which makes the national index fundamentally different from the international databases Web of Science and Scopus, where only the best journals are selected. This must also be taken into account when choosing scientometric indicators calculated in the RSCI for assessing scientific activity. For example, the number of publications of a scientist in the RSCI speaks only of his publication activity, but says nothing about the quality of these works. At the same time, it is quite possible to identify in the RSCI a core of the best journals, the quality of which is beyond doubt, and calculate your indicators for them. Such a project to assess the scientific level of journals and form their highly rated segment was implemented in 2015 and ended with the creation of a pool of publications included in the Web of Science database.

The initiators of the project to place the best Russian journals on this platform were Thomson Reuters and the Scientific Electronic Library eLIBRARY.RU. The first is the copyright holder of the most authoritative international scientific citation database, Web of Science, the second is the developer and operator of the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI). The companies jointly came up with the idea of ​​​​creating a new Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) database, including the 1000 best Russian scientific journals.

For Thomson Reuters, this project is interesting in the context of the further development of the line of regional scientific citation indices hosted on the Web of Science platform. RSCI became the fourth regional database on this platform after Chinese (Chinese Science Citation Database), Latin American (SciELO Citation Index) and Korean (KCI Korean Journal Database).

For the Scientific Electronic Library, this project is important because it allows us to identify the core of the best Russian journals in the RSCI and improve the methodology for calculating bibliometric indicators used to evaluate scientists and scientific organizations.

The successful implementation of the project is also an important step towards solving a number of problems in the future, such as, for example, improving the quality of Russian scientific journals by bringing them to international standards, increasing the bibliometric indicators of Russian journals in the Web of Science and the integral indicators of Russia as a whole, integration of Russian scientific journals into the global information space, promotion of the results of domestic scientific research at the international level.

How to objectively evaluate the quality of scientific journals

The main question that arose at the project launch stage was how to select the best journals for inclusion in RSCI. The option of using the method of evaluating journals only by their impact factor, which is widely used in the world, was no longer needed. Firstly, this indicator strongly depends on the scientific direction. Secondly, this indicator can easily be artificially “boosted” by increasing self-citation in a journal or mutual citation from “friendly” journals.

The option of using the RSCI list of Higher Attestation Commissions as a basis for the formation of the RSCI list was also not considered: journals are included in this list on the basis of purely formal criteria, as a result of which even journals classified as “junk” (i.e. journals that quickly publish for money) are included there. all incoming articles without any peer review).

Projects in which a global assessment of the quality of national journals and dividing them into categories in accordance with their scientific level were carried out are known in world practice. However, in Russia, a systematic expert assessment of the entire body of published scientific journals has never been carried out; only work on the assessment of journals within individual scientific areas is known. In this sense, the project to form RSCI turned out to be unique not only in that it was the first of its kind, but also in the variety of methods that were used to achieve the most objective assessment of the quality of publications.

There are two main approaches to assessing the results of scientific activity - the use of bibliometric indicators and examination. The same approaches are used when evaluating scientific journals. Each of these approaches has its pros and cons, so ideally it is advisable to combine both approaches.

The use of bibliometric indicators is attractive because it allows you to quickly evaluate or rank a large number of objects: publications, scientists, organizations, journals, etc. The advantages of this approach also usually include its objectivity. At the same time, this approach often turns out to be too simplified for assessing such a complex area of ​​​​human activity as scientific research.

Peer review allows for a comprehensive analysis and evaluation of scientific research if necessary, but it also takes a lot of time. The main disadvantage of this approach is subjectivity, which can have a serious impact on the assessment results. The subjectivity of the approach can manifest itself at different stages of the assessment process - from the selection of appropriate experts to the interpretation of the examination results.

Despite the fundamentally different methods of assessment, there is much in common between expertise and bibliometrics. At its core, assessment using bibliometric indicators is also a form of examination. Take, for example, such an indicator as the number of publications in leading international journals. The presence of articles in such journals means that these works have been reviewed, that is, peer-reviewed at the stage of accepting the manuscript for publication. Or another indicator - the number of citations. The presence of links to an article means that other scientists in this way have already indirectly assessed this work by citing it, that is, this is also a form of examination, but with the help of the entire scientific community.

Accordingly, the problems when using these two assessment methods are largely common. Therefore, they should not be opposed to each other, but, on the contrary, used together. Adequate results can only be achieved by competently combining the advantages of different approaches to assessing the results of scientific activity.

To organize the work of assessing and selecting journals, RSCI formed a Working Group, whose members headed the relevant thematic expert councils. It included:

Anatoly Grigoriev (Chairman of the Working Group) - Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Chairman of the Scientific Publishing Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences, scientific director of the State Scientific Center Institute of Medical and Biological Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences (biological sciences and multidisciplinary journals);

Alexander Baranov - Director of the Scientific Center for Children's Health of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences (medical sciences);

Leonid Gokhberg (Deputy Chairman of the Working Group) - First Vice-Rector of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Director of the Institute of Statistical Research and Economics of Knowledge of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (social sciences and humanities);

Gennady Eremenko - General Director of the Scientific Electronic Library eLIBRARY.RU (advisory council on bibliometrics);

Evgeniy Kablov - President of the Association of State Scientific Centers, General Director of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise "All-Russian Institute of Aviation Materials" of the State Scientific Center of the Russian Federation (engineering and technical sciences);

Valery Kozlov - Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the Mathematical Institute named after V.A. Steklov RAS (mathematical, computer and information sciences);

Yuri Lachuga - Academician-Secretary of the Department of Agricultural Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences (agricultural sciences);

Nikolay Sobolev - chief researcher at the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy named after V.S. Sobolev SB RAS (Earth sciences);

Alexey Khokhlov - Vice-Rector of Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov (physical and chemical sciences);

Andrey Nazarenko - Scientific Publishing Council (NISO) RAS, scientific secretary of the Working Group.

The heads of thematic areas formed expert councils, which involved leading scientists and representatives of various scientific organizations (specialized departments and research centers of the Russian Academy of Sciences, federal and research universities, state research centers, etc.). Each member of the Working Group coordinated the organization of the examination of journals in one of the main scientific areas. In addition, a permanent advisory council was created at the RSCI, which included experts in scientometrics. The competence of this council included the preparation of recommendations on methodological issues of bibliometric assessment of scientific journals.

Dynamics of changes in the average two-year self-citation rate (%) of Russian journals.

Expert review

An important requirement for evaluating journals with the participation of experts was to minimize the influence of subjective factors. Thus, the picture could be distorted by the expert’s lack of breadth of scientific horizons, his giving higher ratings to journals where he, the expert, has published or is a reviewer/member of the editorial board, as well as a conflict between the expert and the editors. One of the effective ways to achieve objectivity is to increase the number of experts participating in the assessment procedure. However, this complicates the assessment procedure and increases the examination time. It was possible to significantly increase the number of experts participating in the assessment through public voting via the Internet.

To organize the work of assessing and selecting journals, RSCI formed a Working Group, whose members headed the relevant expert councils in the thematic areas in which the journals operate. Their task was primarily to assess the scientific level of journals. Taking into account the specifics of scientific fields, the methodology for selecting journals in each expert council could be slightly different, but the main criteria for selecting journals were common:

The degree of uneven quality of articles;

Position of the journal in Russia and in the world in this subject area.

The experts were not tasked with selecting exactly 1000 journals for RSCI (the number stipulated in the agreement between Thomson Reuters and NEB) or any other fixed number of journals. In the same way, no initial quotas were set for the number of journals in each area or the proportions between them. The task of the expert councils was to select journals that not only occupy leading positions in the country in this scientific direction, but also are of interest to the international scientific community.

When creating RSCI, for the first time in domestic practice, a large-scale assessment of the level of journals was carried out with the involvement of a large number of active scientists (public examination). Expanded public examination of journals was carried out through an online survey of more than 30 thousand leading Russian scientists. The expert assessment was carried out on the website eLIBRARY.RU for 40 days by filling out special questionnaires.

To organize a broad public examination of Russian scientific journals, a database of Russian scientists was used, formed in the Science Index information and analytical system, launched by the NEB in 2011. Each survey participant could independently select no more than three scientific areas and evaluate journals in each of these areas, plus, if desired, multidisciplinary journals. Each journal in the questionnaire could be assigned to one of four levels:

4* - journal of international level (worthy of inclusion in the Web of Science Core Collection);

3* - national-level journal (certainly worthy of inclusion in RSCI);

2* - mid-level journal (potential candidate for inclusion in RSCI);

1* - low-level journal (not worthy of inclusion in RSCI).

As a result of the public examination, 12,800 expert questionnaires were received. The total number of ratings given to journals was 240 thousand (the option “the journal is not familiar to the expert” is not taken into account here). For each journal, two additional indicators were calculated: the total number of ratings received and the average rating. The first characterizes the fame of the journal (but, of course, depends on the number of scientists working in this direction), the second reflects the scientific level and authority of the journal in the professional scientific community. Together with bibliometric data, the indicators were transferred to expert councils in scientific areas.

An analysis of the results of the public examination showed a high level of demands from scientists for journals. Thus, only 110 journals out of almost 3,000 included in the questionnaires were classified as world-class journals (average score > 3.5 out of 4). 530 journals received a rating greater than 3, 900 journals received a rating greater than 2.75, and 1,400 journals received a rating greater than 2.5.

The final decision to include a journal in RSCI was made by the Working Group in accordance with the conclusions of thematic expert councils, obtained on the basis of analysis and synthesis of the results of evaluation of journals by experts, formal criteria, bibliometric indicators of the journal and public examination of journals by leading Russian scientists. The working group selected 652 journals worthy of inclusion in the Russian Science Citation Index. This is significantly less than the thousand initially expected, which, on the one hand, indicates fairly strict selection criteria, and on the other, makes it possible to gradually expand the list at the next stages of selection.

This list is not final and inviolable. It was decided to continue work on annual monitoring of the quality of journals and make additions and changes to the list of journals posted in the Russian Science Citation Index on the Web of Science platform. The Working Group included Academician-Secretary of the Department of Historical and Philological Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences Valery Tishkov, who headed the expert council on the humanities, allocated to an independent thematic area.

Any Russian journal, having chosen the right editorial policy and established strict criteria for reviewing and accepting manuscripts for publication, has a real chance of being included in the RSCI at the next stages of selection. Conversely, if a journal exhibits a clear degradation in the quality of published articles or violations of editorial and publishing ethics are detected (including attempts to artificially “cheat” bibliometric indicators), then such journals will be re-examined by expert councils and may be excluded from RSCI.

After forming the list of journals for RSCI, it became possible to see how the selected journals are distributed by scientific field and how much this distribution differs from the thematic distribution of Russian journals in the Web of Science and in the RSCI.

It turned out that if the Web of Science mainly indexes Russian journals in the field of natural and technical sciences, then in the RSCI, on the contrary, social, humanitarian and multidisciplinary journals are represented to a greater extent. As for RSCI, intermediate values ​​are obtained for most areas, that is, in RSCI the distribution of journals across areas is more even than in Web of Science. This can be considered a positive development, since the insufficient coverage of Russian social and humanitarian journals in the Web of Science makes it difficult to use this database to correctly reflect the activities of Russian scientists and scientific organizations in the social and humanitarian field.

At the same time, if we compare RSCI with RSCI, then the share of selected journals in the field of social sciences and humanities is significantly less than in the field of natural, technical, medical and agricultural sciences. This means that the scientific level of most social and humanitarian journals, according to experts, does not yet correspond to the world level, or these journals are of insufficient interest to the international scientific community.

Finally, it is worth noting some of the problems associated with using lists of scientific journals to evaluate scientific activity. Despite the widespread use of this approach, it is often the subject of intense criticism from the scientific and publishing communities. Moreover, it is not only and not so much the inclusion of journals in the list that is criticized, but the very principle of using such lists to evaluate scientific activity.

Indeed, how are the results of the selection of scientific journals usually used in practice? They compile a list of conditionally “good” journals (WOS, Scopus, VAK list). And, for example, only articles published in journals from this list are taken into account when assessing the effectiveness of the scientific activities of scientists and organizations. One way or another, with this approach, the assessment of a group of journals descends to the level of assessment of individual articles published in them. This is precisely the main mistake. Indeed, this approach is based on the assumption that scientific articles are similar in their level not only within one journal, but also within journals classified in the same group. An analysis of the distribution of articles in a journal according to their citations refutes this assumption and shows that the spread in citations of specific articles can be very high. Therefore, it cannot be said that the articles of two different scientists, being published in the same journal, are of approximately the same level.

In addition, there is a problem of incorrect use of such lists by scientific administrators, who begin to encourage researchers to publish only in journals from the “good” list. That is, the lists of journals themselves are turning from a tool for statistical assessment of scientific activity into a tool for administrative influence and pressure on scientists. This, in turn, leads to an outflow of good publications from journals that are not included in the list, their gradual degradation and loss of competitiveness.

All this does not mean that ranking scientific journals has no practical application. It is important that the methodological limitations of this approach described above are taken into account in the process of assessing scientific activity based on ranking of journals.