Translated material
Project “Corps of Natural Science Experts” in 2016
The “Corps of Experts” project [1] is apparently best known to the scientific community for its lists of “Indices of Citation of Works of Russian Scientists” (“Stern Lists”) [2]. Maintaining and updating these lists, despite the use of numerous automatic tools for marking up downloaded articles from the Web of Science (WoS) and various mechanisms for feedback to authors, is still the most time-consuming part of the project.
This work is not only in demand in itself (both individuals and organizations use the lists). It is also necessary to solve the main tasks of the project related to the search for trustworthy experts, since only by annually updating information about publications can the database be kept up to date and scientific specializations clarified.
Perhaps not everyone knows that CE is an initiative project with extremely few human resources and without any government funding. Funds for the modest remuneration of technical workers and for the annual fee under the contract with Thomson Reuters (necessary for legalizing the lists) have been the sole concern of the project working group for the past seven years.
For several years, approximately half of the funding came from grants from the Dynasty Foundation. Since 2014, there has been no grant funding at all; the project was supported only by contracts for various types of expert and analytical work (mainly with the Russian Venture Company).
Using the example of specialized surveys from 2007–2013, it became quite obvious that in order to search for experts in a wide range of scientific disciplines using the survey algorithm adopted in the project [3], it is first of all necessary to radically expand the circle of recommenders - specialists with high citation indices.
To expand the lists, letters sent by mail inviting them to check new candidates were completely insufficient. In the process of transferring lists from scientific.ru to expertcorps.ru (in 2009), a multifunctional database was created, and the data imported into it was put in order as much as possible. Since 2011, various efforts have been made to replenish the lists, which have led to their significant expansion, and not only at the expense of representatives of the diaspora (they began to be added to the lists only in 2014).
During the transfer from scientific.ru, the number of specialists on the lists increased 4.4 times and now amounts to more than 8,400 people. The annual update of data for this significant array was carried out until the end of 2015 by the same forces as in all previous years, but this happened at the limit of human capabilities.
Of course, this process is facilitated by the existence of MyResearcherID [4] among a number of colleagues, which makes it possible to identify explicit links to the works of a given author and thereby simplifies the manual work of marking hidden links (for hidden links, see [5], as well as in the section “Often FAQ" on page [2]). But if authors set up MyResearcherID and forget to tag new articles, then this tool begins to create additional problems. Now we know about 1700 MyResearcherIDs (mostly found in open sources, much less often received from authors). But, unfortunately, less than half of them are updated by the authors.
Additional complications are created by regular innovations of WoS itself, associated with both interface changes and the emergence of new applications. The most odious event of 2015 was the connection of the Russian Citation Index application, which flooded WoS with data from the RSCI. One of the consequences of this innovation was double counting of translated and Russian-language versions of the same articles (for now for a small number of journals).
Taking into account the ever-increasing labor costs, the working group does not see the possibility of continuing to maintain the citation lists with existing forces as before, and also cannot provide funding for the project sufficient to attract and train new employees. Therefore, the following decisions were made.
- Contact the scientific community with a proposal to look for sources of funding for the project.
- Until the emergence of any additional sources that make it possible to ensure work with lists in the previous mode, data updates, in the general case, should be carried out not annually, but once every two years.
- Save annual data updates for everyone who has MyResearcherID and regularly updates the markup of articles in this resource. The corresponding MyResearcherID number must be reported to the project administrator at lists@gmail.com or through individual windows in the lists (opened by clicking on the last name).
- Provide institutes that wish to annually (or more frequently) update the data of their employees in the lists in-house, the opportunity to use existing tools. In this case, after detailed instructions and work in test mode, selective access to the cards of institute employees can be created.
Congratulating the readers of TrV-Nauka on the new and old new year, we note that the slogan about saving drowning people with their own hands is invariably relevant in our scientific life.
2. http://expertcorps.ru/science/whoiswho
3. http://expertcorps.ru/science/methods