The h-Index in the Russian Science Citation Index

Abstract

The recent years have witnessed using numerical measurements of research work, apart from the indicator of financial and administrative support and that of educational activities, as a rating and monitoring criterion in assessing performance of higher education institutions and scientific organizations. Assessment of research performance through calculations is unfamiliar to the Russian academic community and is often misunderstood or even rejected. The authors analyze the h-index, an index of published work productivity, considering it to be the most appropriate scientometric indicator that allows to smooth over many drawbacks of assessing research achievements by mere calculation of the number of published works or citations. The authors also discuss using Web of Science and Scopus scientometric platforms to assess research productivity of Russian scientists. There are two reasons why using them sometimes provides information that is imprecise or incomplete: a) only works published in English are taken into account, and b) mostly natural science journals are selected. The paper demonstrates how the h-index is currently calculated in the Russian Science Citation Index and how the indices can be optimized after processing the existing RSCI data files and adding new data. Based on the experiment of calculating the h-index for three authors on the RSCI platform, the authors of the paper have come to the conclusion that quantitative research assessment techniques will most often be non-objective and may only be applied together with expert opinions.