Research performance by Federal and National Research Universities and impact of competitive funding on their publication activity

Bibliometrics has become a very important tool in government science policy in nowadays Russia. The paper describes the bibliometric performance by two research communities: the Russian Academy of Science (RAS) and Higher education sector (HES). Sources were the Science Citation Index-Expanded for 2007-2011 and the Journal Citation Reports, 2010. More than 141,600 records and their citation scores were analyzed by broad subject categories, organizations, source of publications and share of internationally collaborative papers. Despite huge financial inflow in HES in the last seven year, RAS performance is still much stronger. The RAS is responsible for 56.3% of the research output, the HES for 42.6%. Research portfolio is focused on “hard sciences”. A significant involvement of RAS in collaboration with HES was observed. Its share of collaborative papers with HES increased from 26.6% in 2007 up to 33.8% in 2011. Federal Universities and National Research demonstrate more strong collaboration with the RAS. A special study was conducted of papers cited at least 30 times (1153 unique records). International collaboration had a significant impact on Russian citation scores. Among 1153 highly cited papers 86.6% were internationally collaborative papers. The RAS contributed 59.4% to number of highly cited papers, twice more than HES. Our data demonstrate a dominannce by Russian Academy of Sciences performance over performance of Higher Education Sector and provide a better empirical basis for science policy.