Publications
The ratio between universal and national components of sociology has been discussed for decades. Not only is this discussion interesting for sociologists, but it is also important for science managers. International databases and ratings are used to assess scientific performance more and more often in Russia. It is widely known that the coverage of the most famous and commonly used databases is biased towards English-language literature. One can suppose that the role of English-language publications is not the same for all science fields. Thus, the validity of international databases as instruments for assessing scientific performance depends crucially on the geographical universality of the research frontier, theories and methods of the particular field of science. In this study we compare the globalization level of sociology and applied physics in terms of quantitative characteristics of the scientific communication system. The results obtained show a significant difference in the globalization level of the fields considered. Thus, this study gives us another proof to the necessity of a differentiated approach to the scientific performance assessment.
We consider the “Matthew effect” in the citation process which leads to reallocation (or misallocation) of the citations received by scientific papers within the same journals. The case when such reallocation correlates with a country where an author works is investigated. Russian papers in chemistry and physics published abroad were examined. We found that in both disciplines in about 60% of journals Russian papers are cited less than average ones. However, if we consider each discipline as a whole, citedness of a Russian paper in physics will be on the average level, while chemistry publications receive about 16% citations less than one may expect from the citedness of the journals where they appear. Moreover, Russian chemistry papers mostly become undercited in the leading journals of the field. Characteristics of a “Matthew index” indicator and its significance for scientometric studies are also discussed.
The scientificometric aspect of the “Matthews Effect,” i.e., the difference in the citations of the papers of Russian and foreign scientists published in the same publications, is studied. Publications in foreign journals on physics and chemistry are considered. The “Matthew Index,” which characterizes nonuniform distribution of citations over countries, is calculated. A conclusion on the poor “competitiveness” of Russian articles in chemistry and inadequate conformance of publications in physics to the world level is made.
