Measuring excellence in Russia: Highly cited papers, leading institutions, patterns of national and international collaboration

Abstract

In this study, we discover Russian “centers of excellence” and explore patterns of their collaboration with each other and with foreign partners. Highly cited papers serve as a proxy for “excellence” and coauthored papers as a measure of collaborative efforts. We find that currently research institutes (of the Russian Academy of Sciences as well as others) remain the key players despite recent government initiatives to stimulate university science. The contribution of the commercial sector to high‐impact research is negligible. More than 90% of Russian highly cited papers involve international collaboration, and Russian institutions often do not play a dominant role. Partnership with U.S., German, U.K., and French scientists increases markedly the probability of a Russian paper becoming highly cited. Patterns of national (“intranational”) collaboration in world‐class research differ significantly across different types of organizations; the strongest ties are between three nuclear/particle physics centers. Finally, we draw a coauthorship map to visualize collaboration between Russian centers of excellence.

Characteristics of Malaysian highly cited papers

“…Aksnes's (2003) study of 297 Norway's highly cited papers identified typical characteristics such as they are authored by a large number of scientists and involve extensive international collaboration as quality dynamics. Similar studies conducted in China (Fu et al 2011), Taiwan (Miyairi and Chang 2012) and Russia (Pislyakov and Shukshina 2014) substantiate the widely accepted view that international collaboration is almost a requirement for publishing highly cited papers. About 47 percent of all China ESI papers have collaboration with the group of eight (G8) highly industrialized nations, especially the United States (Fu et al 2011).…”

“…(Pislyakov and Shukshina 2014). This shows that international and large number of co-authorship typically increases visibility of papers and proves to be profitable in terms of citations (Pislyakov and Shukshina 2014). Additionally, Chen, Arsenault, and Larivière (2015) reported the top 1 percent most cited papers exhibit higher levels of interdisciplinarity, implying that interdisciplinary research plays an important role in creating major scientific discoveries and generating high impact knowledge.…”

“…It is notable that although more than 90 percent of Russian highly cited papers involve international collaboration, Russian institutions often do not play a dominant role. (Pislyakov and Shukshina 2014). This shows that international and large number of co-authorship typically increases visibility of papers and proves to be profitable in terms of citations (Pislyakov and Shukshina 2014).…”

“…Previous studies have shown that highly cited papers are characterized by an extensive element of co-authorship and co-authored papers serve as a measure of collaborative efforts (Fu et al 2011;Aksnes 2003;Pislyakov and Shukshina 2014). Malaysian 708 highly cited papers are authored by 7638 authors, indicating an average of 10.8 authors per paper, of which 15.8 percent (1204) are Malaysian-based authors and 83.7 percent (6434) are international authors.…”

“…How different are highly cited papers from ordinary cited papers? It has been shown that highly cited papers are the results of international collaboration and multi-authorship (Aksnes 2003;Fu et al 2011;Glänzel and Schubert 1995;Miyairi and Chang 2012;Persson 2010;Pislyakov and Shukshina 2014;Tijssen, Van Leeuwen and Visser 2002). Do these characteristics holfd true for Malaysian highly cited papers?…”