How highly is Russian science rated by the international academic community, and is there evidence that government support has been an important driver behind an increase in Russian universities’ publication output? A brief study of the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) abstract and citation databases provides an answer.

To assess a country’s global academic standing in terms of its universities’ research activity, one can look at the number of publications in sources indexed by the international Scopus and WoS databases.

At the end of March 2019, Russian scientists authored over 98,000 publications in Scopus-indexed titles and over 75,800 publications in WoS-indexed ones.

Russia has been gradually improving its positions in Scopus over the past 15 years. The number of publications by Russian scientists included in the database rose from 36,650 in 2003 to 49,702 in 2013 to 89,449 in 2017. They were most numerous in such subject areas as physics and astronomy, engineering, materials sciences, chemistry and mathematics. Publications dealing with quarks, neutrinos and air conditioning and ventilation had the highest citation index (FWCI) value.

According to Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) data in InCites Benchmarking & Analytics (retrieved on March 11, 2019), Russian researchers published 382,935 papers in 2013-2018. This makes up 2.4% of a total of 16,051,825 major academic publications in WoS-indexed natural sciences, social sciences and arts and humanities journals and puts Russia in 15th place among 223 countries.

Source: https://5top100.ru/en/news/101352/