Once again about the "average temperature in the hospital"

Doct. physical. sciences, leading researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics. Landau RAS Sergey Korshunov cast a slightly more close look at the contribution of Russian researchers to the world stream of scientific publications.

Since the low share of Russian publications in international reviewed magazines was called one of the motives of the so -called “RAS Reform”, I had a desire to look at the extent to which this manifests itself in various fields of science.

This turned out to be possible using data published on the SCIMAGO Journal & Country Rank [1]. Below they are reduced to the table. Its first column is the field of science, and in the second - the share of Russian publications (as a percentage) in 2012 in the relevant field of science in the SCOPUS database is given.

As you can see, physics leads by a large margin. Other natural sciences (with the exception of biology), mathematics and technical disciplines have indicators above average, biology - below the average, and social and humanities and medicine are significantly lower than the average. The question of the reasons for such a scatter (which, without a doubt, are very diverse) and the conclusions that should be drawn from its existence, go beyond this brief note.

My goal is to demonstrate how pointarily it is to characterize the state of Russian science with “average temperature in the hospital”. However, I can notice that the transfer of all academics of the RAMS to academics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (with an appropriate increase in monetary allowance) is far from the measure that could help reduce the lag of Russian medicine from other disciplines in publication activity.

On the same portal you can find data that allow you to compare how different the traditions of citation in various fields are. The third column of the table shows the average number of quotes of articles published in 19962012 (also SCOPUS data). From these figures it is clear that when analyzing quoting data, it is certainly necessary to consider which field of science we are talking about. And inside the listed regions, the average number of citation may differ very significantly (as, say, in the case of nuclear physics and physics of the condensed state).

In the fourth column, similar quotation data are given for the articles of Russian authors. Unfortunately, in this sense, in all disciplines, we are lagging behind the mid -ID level. It is quite unexpected that the smallest (20%) this lag is in the humanities (section Art & Humanities in [1]). This is followed by mathematics (25%), and then physics with astronomy and medicine (about 30%).

The situation in the sense of citation is the worst in the social sciences, psychology and engineering (the lag from the average level is about three times). Based on the results, we can state the lack of a clear correlation between what share in the world stream of publications we have in this discipline, and how well these works are cited.

1. The Scimago Journal & Country Rank is a portal that publishes scientific indicators in magazines and countries obtained from the Scopus database http://www.scimagojr.com/countrySearch.php?rea=0&country=&w=world