Soviet/Russian Publication Flow Dynamics Analysis for Physics Subject Area and 1980–2020 Period

Abstract

The scientific document’s (published in USSR (until 1991) then in Russia) flow included in the SCOPUS database Subject Area «Pphysics and Astronomy») for the period 1980-2020 is considered. It is shown that the flow dynamics development, in general, corresponds to the dynamic’s development of this branch world flow, and the share of the Soviet / Russian part of it, without ever falling out of the “top ten”, is increasing, reaching the third place among all participants by 2020. The number of documents types included in this flow varies from three to ten, but more than 90% of the total is always document types: the journal article and conference proceedings, publication. From so these two types of documents are considered below. The analysis revealed a quantitative increase (after 2018) in the share of conference proceedings, with a corresponding decrease in the share of journal publications. The point of view was verified that this is a purely Russian feature associated with taking into account the results of scientific work, however, a similar trend was revealed in the world publication’s flow and in the publications flows of a number of another countries, although in the Russian publications flow it is more pronounced. In general, this phenomenon requires a special additional study. Next, the citations of journal articles included to the Russian document’ flow were analyzed. Citations for three publications flow (1980, 1990 and 2000 years) were analyzed separately. This analysis showed a noticeable decrease in the number of uncited documents in the flow of 2000, which indicates a general interest in Russian publications increase. At the same time, it was found that a twenty-year period is not enough to get a complete picture of documents citing for a certain year of publication, included to this interval. A separate analysis of the citing for published documents with and without foreign co-authorship was carried out. `It has been established that the uncited documents percentage among documents with foreign co-authorship is significantly lower, and the average citation is significantly higher. The citing documents authors affiliation for citing Soviet/Russian publications was also analyzed. It was found that more than 80% of citing documents do not have authors with Russian affiliation. At the same time, among the first three affiliation countries for the citing documents authors of all publications of the three years under consideration are the USA and Germany, as well as (once) Japan and China.