KIAS: first impressions

In the summer, Russian scientists (mostly young so far) encountered the KIAS system ( kias.rfbr.ru ). Now applications for RFBR grants must be submitted through it, and not through the usual “Grant Express”, which, in the opinion of many scientists, has either been perfected, or they have become sufficiently accustomed to it that it begins to seem convenient. The new system is both unusual and, in many respects, extremely inconvenient. We will mainly touch on the most labor-intensive aspect, according to the responses of a number of colleagues - the system for entering publications.

It is completely unclear why, despite the existence of a huge number of available bibliographic systems (WoS, Scopus, NASA AdS, PubMed, Scholar Google and, of course, the domestic RSCI - aka eLibrary), as well as the usual popular formats (BibTeX), the KIAS system does not allow importing publications. This is surprising and annoying, while, according to available information, a lot of money was paid for the system developed by the Scientific Research Institute of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

For comparison, let’s say that the developers of the ISTINA system at Moscow State University were able to provide quite convenient import of publications from other bibliographic systems. This required only a short test with the participation of several volunteer scientists, but the result was much better.

So, it is impossible to import from bibliographic databases, so everyone enters their own publications. This is where the nightmare begins. Below we use responses from colleagues from different institutions. Searching for English-language names does not work at all, and this makes the work even more difficult, since the main scientific results are published in English.

In Russian, searching for an author using a query like “last name + first name” does not work. Moreover, since only the first 50 are returned from the search results, it is not possible to select, for example, an author with the surname “Sergeev” (or “Petrov”, “Ivanov”, etc.); instead, the system returns more than 50 different “ Sergeevich" (patronymic).

It is not possible to view search results pages other than the first one. Moreover, the search generally works poorly. For example, the space after a word is not taken into account. Because of this, it is impossible, for example, to select the publication “RNA”, since the system displays the first 50 of 2400 results containing the combination of letters rna (despite the fact that there are tons of journals with the name “InterRNAtional...”).

You cannot edit information about the entered author, i.e. if you misspelled the name of his place of work, then you can only destroy the co-author and enter everything again or leave it with an error. By the way, many users simply do not enter the names of all co-authors, because they do not see the point in struggling with a list of dozens of people. A universal method is to use a single co-author “et al.” Some users enter information about the publication as best they can, confusing all the fields, lumping everything into one pile. All this leads to the appearance of duplicate articles with differently specified parameters.

The first author automatically becomes the person filling in, and there is no system for changing the order of authors (for example, the “move up”, “move down” arrows on the page for editing publication parameters). This (given the existing inadequacy in linking authors to publications), in addition to inconvenience during input, also leads to an incorrect order of authors, which is bad for expert assessments, since in some cases the order of authors is very significant. Due to the fact that the person filling in always comes first, articles appear with authorship like I. I. Ivanov, A. A. Petrov, I. I. Ivanov.

If the journal from which you want to enter an article is not yet in the system, then you must first register full information about it, and sometimes about the publisher as well. Even for the most famous, this, alas, was not done in advance. Accordingly, those who started working first entered information even about, say, journals in the Physical Review series. In general, those who worked in the system even at the stage of the “mol_a” grant were horrified by its quality. Some things seem to have been improved since then, but why release such a badly-improved product?

Sorting does not work in the list of articles: the links in the table header are not active. The setting for the number of publications displayed on one sheet is lost when leaving the page and returning to it. As a result, these two shortcomings make viewing the “My Publications” feed inconvenient.

There is no system for linking the author of a publication in English writing to a person who has an account in KIAS. In general, the system of linking an author to a publication needs significant improvement. Ideally, you need to make sure that in the list of authors you can link each of them to a person who has an account. Now this is possible only for oneself, i.e. for the author under whose name the user is currently logged in.

A separate form for each bibliographic reference in an article is simply beyond good and evil. If filling out such a form becomes mandatory, then perhaps it would be worth organizing a rally near the “Golden Brains”, where the RFBR lives?

Colleagues encountered an interesting curiosity when a student began registering with KlAS on the last day of submission. The system issued: “SNILS with this number has already been entered.” That is, apparently, someone made a typo, and the other person now cannot register. Another colleague immediately joked that this would be a good way to get rid of competitors.

There is confusion at MSU about which organization to apply for. Traditionally, many applications were submitted from departments (faculties and institutes), but now a response from the vice-rector has appeared, which states that Moscow State University should be declared as the parent organization. The curious thing is that Moscow State University is present in several guises in the KIAS system. We hope that applications will not be withdrawn from the competition due to the absurdities of the system.

Users also complain that the system sometimes “slows down”, that there are problems with the “place of work” section (the institute can appear under different names, none of which is often completely correct), and the application managers could not control this in a timely manner. Why, say, Hungary was awarded a separate point in the countries where co-authors work, and Italy falls into the “others” is a mystery. When trying to send a list of comments, some received emails from the address kias@rfbr.ru . None of the respondents have yet received answers (or at least notifications of receipt).

Among the advantages, users note only the visual qualities of the interface, as well as the availability of help (which, however, also has complaints).

In the end, what do we have? Scientists spend a lot of time manually entering information that has long existed in different places in a convenient, accessible form. Why couldn’t it have been possible to at least import publications from the RSCI-eLibrary (not to mention more convenient systems and formats), since this system was financed and promoted as national pride? What the people who decided to transfer applications to the KIAS system and who developed this system were thinking is unclear. It seems that they certainly did not think about making the work of Russian scientists more efficient.

Prepared by Sergey Popov

You can express your opinion about the KIAS system on the page http://trv-science-ru.livejournal.com/131873.html