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Decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, medical research in Russia is poorly integrated into global science. In this study we analyze how the presence of Russian medical research in international journals have changed in recent years (2010-2020). We collected the data from different sources – Web of Science, Scopus, Medline, Russian Science Citation Index. Although the articles in international journals still make up a smaller part of all Russian medical publications, it has grown significantly in recent years. Among these publications, articles in high impact journals account for about a third of the total flow. International cooperation is one of the main drivers of top-level Russian medical publications. Considering how many ties and collaborations with foreign scientists have been cut or suspended recently, we can assume a significant reduction in Russia's presence in core medical journals in the nearest future.

PurposeThis study aims to assess the validity of citation metrics based on the disciplinary representative survey.Design/methodology/approachThe present project compared citation rankings for individual scientists with expert judgments collected through a survey of 818 Russian sociologists. The Russian Index of Science Citation was used to construct the general population of 3,689 Russian sociologists, to whom the survey was sent by email. The regression analyses of bibliometric indicators and peer review scores for 723 names of scholars mentioned in the survey have been undertaken.FindingsFindings suggest that scientometric indicators predict with significant accuracy the names of the most influential sociologists and those scholars who are not mentioned while they are less relevant for prediction names which received moderate attention in the survey.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the research on the validity of citation metrics by focusing on scientometric indicators, not limited to traditional metrics but including non-standard publication metrics and indicators of potential metric abuse. Besides, the study presents the national bibliometric data source that is especially important for non-Western higher education systems, less presented in the Web of Science or Scopus.

We examined the role of peer review in quality assurance system developed for regulation higher education institutions in Russia. Given the negative attitude to the state attempts to increase control over universities, why academics volunteered to participate in regulative activity? This article applies the resource allocation theory to explain the engagement in academic service depending on people’s success in their primary job. Results indicate that Russian academics who performed lower in respect with publications and citations in the selective journals are more likely to become an expert engaged in academic citizenship in the form of inspections.

Сейчас, когда обширные данные о науке и научной деятельности могут быть взяты из открытых источников, можно говорить о формировании нового направления исследований науки на основе больших данных. Масштаб данных оказался особенно важным в изучении науки, поскольку при работе с небольшими выборками существует риск неполноты образа объекта. Инструменты сетевого и текстового анализа позволяют иначе решать исследовательские задачи. С их помощью удается отказаться от проведения жестких границ исследовательского поля и заранее сформированных категорий, как это было свойственно многим традиционным исследованиям в сфере науки. Новые возможности в сборе и анализе данных о науке привлекли в эту область специалистов из разных научных областей. Результатом стало применение новых концептуальных моделей, которые уже не ограничиваются только социологическими концептуализациями.

Mikhail Sokolov - Candidate of Sciences in Sociology, Professor. E-mail: msokolov@eu.spb.ruKaterina Guba - Candidate of Sciences in Sociology, Director of the Center for Institutional Analysisof Science & Education. E-mail: kguba@eu.spb.ruAngelika Tsivinskaya - junior researcher at the Center for Institutional Analysis of Science & Education. E-mail: atsivinskaya@eu.spb.ruEuropean University at St. Petersburg. Address: 6/1a Gagarinskaya Str., 191187 St. Petersburg, Russian Federation.Annual Survey of Performance of Higher Education Institutions, conducted in Russia since 2012, was used to identify “inefficient” universities, subject to measures including closure or merging with other schools. As a result of these policies, the number of Russian universities has decreased more than 1.5 times since 2013. In this article, we analyze the consequences of implementing the appraisal system invented by the Russian Ministry. We argue that the use of the Survey reflects a conceptual confusion between effectiveness (the organization’s ability to achieve socially significant goals) and efficiency (the ability to achieve goals with minimal cost). The Ministry has made managerial decisions based on the Survey results (like merging a public university with an allegedly better performing HEI), which indicates understanding of the Survey as an assessment of efficiency. At the same time, statistical analysis of the performance indicators demonstrates that structural characteristics of universities (region and belonging to an institutionalized category, e. g. a pedagogical or an agrarian university) explain the significant part of the variance in the university’s performance. This led to discrimination against certain “unlucky” categories of universities. The methods used include logistic regression to estimate the odds of being labeled as an effective organization in 2014 and the Cox proportional hazards model to estimate the university’s chances of survival between 2013 and 2017.

This paper explores the influence of the Russian University Excellence Initiative (Project 5−100) on university governance structures. We conducted a qualitative study of the university, focusing on changes in academic and managerial self-governance. We found the following. First, the role of the administrators in university decision-making has been strengthened, especially the distribution of financial resources. Separate governing bodies were created from the central administration, the role of professional managers has become more prevalent in the Academic Council, and the tight control on academic departments was increased. These changes were brought about by the newly created role of rector, accompanied by new institutional capacities and financial resources. Second, although the university has called for the participation of academics in new initiatives, the formal governance structures remain relatively unchanged. Academics, including beneficiaries of the university transformation, have not gained greater formal decision-making power.

Recently, we are witnessing an aspiration in the social sciences to collect and analyze the data about human behavior that is being produced with an unprecedented depth and scale. In this article, we discuss how this new data may impact sociology. Big Data has been defined in various ways in literature. Some of the latest works reveal that the key definitional boundary marker is not the volume of data produced, but the traits of velocity and exhaustivity. The differences of this new type of data are that it is not created for research purposes, that it covers the entire population, and that it is produced in real-time. There are two ways to answer the question of key changes in sociology in the era of Big Data. First, new online-data can greatly improve traditional sociological subfields which were prevented from being developed because of a lack of data. Now, there are new results based on online-data which shed light on the causal effect of social influence. Big data can also enable the development of new lines of research because of rapidly-developing computational techniques. This is especially important for those research areas which deal with large bodies of text, and most importantly, new techniques can greatly improve the sociology of culture where empirical research has been less developed when compared with theoretical ideas. Secondly, new data can have an impact on the disciplinary project of sociology. The article ends with the discussion of how Big Data can be used to support data-driven sociology, which differs from mainstream sociology where hypotheses are offered a priori, data is collected, and analyses are conducted to determine the degree to which the hypotheses are supported.

На основе англо-американских исследований академического рынка труда показано, что декларируемый принцип меритократии в науке не имеет приписываемого ему значения. Решающую роль при найме на университетские позиции играет престиж департамента, в котором была получена докторская степень. Роль научных публикаций не является столь значимой и при анализе репутации департамента. Одной только высокой публикационной активности недостаточно ни выпускнику, чтобы получить место в престижном департаменте, ни департаменту, чтобы повысить репутационный рейтинг.DOI: 10.17323/1814-9545-2011-3-210-225

The author considers Anglo-American studies of academic labor market to show that declared principle of meritocracy in science isnt so important. Prestige of the department in which an applicant received a doctoral degree plays a crucial role in the recruitment to different university positions. The role of scientific publications is not so important in analyzing the reputation of the department as well. High publication activity alone is enough neither for a graduate to get a position at a prestigious department, nor for the department to improve the reputation rating.DOI: 10.17323/1814-9545-2011-3-210-225

What can explain variation within the disciplinary communities in expressing the support of metrics in the evaluation of research productivity? The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the attitude to the metrics varies between researchers depending on their academic cultural preferences. We conducted a survey of 1,850 Russian sociologists with the range of questions regarding the main divisions of sociology and perceived legitimacy of metrics for evaluating academic work. We found that although the majority of sociologists do not support giving more value to the publications that appeared in international databases, 30% of respondent expressed the positive attitude to this policy. Researchers with orientation to the global science measured by declarations and behavior publication pattern generally have a more positive attitude regarding using metrics in the research evaluation while academics with commitment to the local path generally have a more negative attitude.