
Cite: Trishchenko N. D., Makeenko M. I., Anisimov I. V. Methodological problems of the study of the national integration into the global scientific landscape: The case of Russian media studies. (Part 2) // Scientific and technical libraries. 2025. No. 8, pp. 22–51. https://doi.org/10.33186/1027-3689-2025-8-22-51

    
    

What is ‘Russian article’
    The next step in refining the results was to consider more detailed citation statistics for articles written in and without international collaboration, because, on the one hand, the results of previous studies suggest the advantage of collaborative articles, and on the other hand, Russian researchers usually play a minor role in such projects, so here we return to the question of how much the articles in collaboration are indicative of real international integration – and can be considered as “Russian” publications at all. Tables 1 and 2 show how the citation patterns of purely Russian and collaborative articles differ.

Table 1
Distribution of articles with international collaboration, 
cited at least once (according to Web of Science), 
by years and groups of citing authors (main database)
Year
Total
Foreign citations
Russian citations

Publ. cited
Number of 
citations
Cit./publ.
Publ. cited
Number of 
citations
Cit./publ.
Publ. cited
Number 
of citations
Cit./publ.
2017
11
97
8,82
9
77
8,56
7
20
2,86
2018
18
141
7,83
14
94
6,71
11
47
4,27
2019
12
88
7,33
8
80
10,00
5
8
1,60
2020
23
162
7,04
20
130
6,50
9
32
3,56
2021
24
66
2,75
20
57
2,85
6
9
1,50
Total
88
554
6,30
71
438
6,17
38
116
3,05
Table 2
Distribution of the articles without international collaboration, 
cited at least once (according to Web of Science), 
by years and groups of citing authors (main base)
Year
Total
Foreign citations
Russian citations

Publ. cited
Number of citations
Cit./publ.
Publ. cited
Number of citations
Cit./publ.
Publ. cited
Number of citations
Cit./publ.
2017
87
192
2,21
24
50
2,08
74
142
1,92
2018
88
175
1,99
28
44
1,57
74
131
1,77
2019
112
241
2,15
43
81
1,88
88
160
1,82
2020
95
179
1,88
37
66
1,78
74
113
1,53
2021
39
57
1,46
20
23
1,15
24
34
1,42
Total
421
844
2,00
152
264
1,74
334
580
1,74
    
    Articles with international collaborations received almost four times more citations from foreign authors than from Russian authors, thus being of little interest to Russian authors. The share of articles cited by foreign authors and the number of citations by foreign authors for articles in collaboration is many times higher.
    Our data are consistent with the results of previous studies, which demonstrated a convincing superiority of collective articles in citation. However, in our case we can still assume that the gap is so significant not only because of the wider dissemination of the article, its self-citation by several authors or something similar, but also because of how little attention is actually paid to the works of Russian researchers in all other cases.
    If we look at the situation again through the prism of collaborations (Tables 3 and 4), but using the “classic” database, we see that with approximately equal number of articles, the two groups differ in citation rates by multiples.
Table 3
Number of citations of the articles with international collaboration 
(according to Web of Science), by years, groups of citing authors 
and quartiles (“classic” database)
Year
Number 
of cited publ.
Numb. 
of cit.
Numb. of cit. by 
foreign authors
Numb. of cit. by 
Russian authors
2017
6
75
72
3
2018
12
128
91
37
2019
7
78
77
1
2020
16
126
118
8
2021
19
57
55
2
Total
60
464
413
51
Table 4
Number of citations of the articles without international collaboration 
(according to Web of Science), by years, 
groups of citing authors and quartiles (“classic” database)
Year
Number of cited publ.
Numb. of cit.
Numb. of cit. by 
foreign authors
Numb. of cit. 
by Russian authors
2017
9
28
20
8
2018
8
29
19
10
2019
16
49
29
20
2020
16
46
32
14
2021
7
13
9
4
Total
56
165
109
56
    
    In the case of foreign citations, the articles with international collaboration are cited 3.5–4 times more often than the articles without one. 
    Note that fractional counting, which helps to make impact estimation more accurate, would not work in our case. And here we come to the next methodological difficulty we encountered when processing data from WoS.
What is ‘Russian author’?
    We could not check the context of each citation, so we needed another way to make the number of citations a more accurate indicator. Since one of the common ways to manipulate statistics implies involving foreign authors in publications with a national (in our case, Russian) affiliation (Guskov, Kosyakov, & Selivanova, 2018), we decided to take a closer look at the actual country affiliation of the authors.
    In the process of checking, it turned out that the above practices are relevant also for the field of media and communication. As a result of the analysis, three groups of authors were formed:
    Russian authors – affiliated only with Russian scientific organizations / universities;
    foreign authors – foreign authors with Russian affiliation / foreign or Russian authors with dual (Russian and foreign) affiliation;
    collaborations – Russian authors и Foreign authors (according to the classification in group 2).
    This grouping is due to the fact that very often foreign authors write articles on topics not related to Russia in any way, but at the same time they indicate a Russian affiliation. An example would be a Greek author who published articles on Greek media, but stated an affiliation only with a Russian university. Obviously, in this case it is more logical for our analysis to classify such an author as a foreign author who temporarily serves the publication interests of a Russian organization. A similar situation arises with some Russian authors whose main place of work has long been a foreign university, but whose domestic affiliation is formally present as well. To identify foreign authors with Russian affiliation, we had to manually check the data in the database. It should be noted that we classified as articles written by “foreign authors” only those publications authored exclusively by individuals who are no longer connected to Russia in any meaningful way or were never affiliated with Russia. If a “Russian author” was involved in the work, the publication was considered collaborative.
    As a result, we were able to significantly refine the results of the study (Image 1).

Image 1. Summary data on articles with different types of authors: 
number of articles, citation rates – with correction of authors' group 
(“classic” database)
    In the original data, purely foreign authors could be present only within the context of collaborations, otherwise the article would not have been included in the sample. However, in fact, not only were there 15% of articles by actually foreign authors, but they also account for a quarter of all citations, and the average number of citations per article is 3 times higher than that of articles by purely Russian authors.
Additional questions
    During the course of the work, we encountered several less significant methodlogical issues; however, in our view, they also deserve to be described and discussed.
Chronological clustering of the authors of cited sources 
    When we were trying to determine how actively Russian authors access current foreign scientific literature, we faced the task of categorizing authors into different chronological clusters. If we had focused only on the author's Russian affiliation, it would not have allowed us to understand how much contemporary research is used and what potential share in the literature used could be occupied by translated works (the classics of the last century were mostly translated into Russian and used in this version, which is not particularly conducive to integration). 
    To assign an author to a particular group, we focused on the year of publication of the median of his or her cited works. For most of the authors we automatically generated values for the field “group of authors”: "classic" (up to the 1990s) / "new" (late 1990s – late 2000s) / "latest" (2010 and onwards), but for 812 records we could not do it, which in some cases is due to insufficient data. Then, also in some cases, a manual refinement of the group was carried out, since reprints and quoted translated versions gave distortions. It should be taken into account that the manual check of all records was not carried out, so due to the automatic distribution into groups there may be some errors in the results of the study, but we have not found a better solution.
Classification of collaborator affiliation countries 
    When considering the statistics on citations of Russian articles, we also considered the breakdown of citations by country. If we do not count self-citations, the majority of citations for both basic and “classic” articles are from Western European countries, followed by the USA (Table 5, 
Image 2).
    

Table 5
Distribution of citations by country (geographic approach, “classic” database)
Country group
Number of citations
Share
Western Europe
260
33
USA
118
15
Russia
100
13
Asia (excl. CIS and China)
72
9
China
53
7
Eastern Europe (excl. CIS)
45
6
Australia
33
4
Middle East
30
4
South America
26
3
CIS
23
3
Canada
18
2
Africa
16
2
Total
795
100
    

Image 2. Distribution of citations by country 
(geographic approach, “classic” database)
    However, we did not find this division satisfactory, as, in fact, many of the countries in the table belong to what can be called one research culture and it would be much more illustrative and revealing to group them together on this basis (Table 6, Image 3). We classified Western Europe, the United States, Israel, Japan, Canada, Singapore, and South Korea as part of the “Western” group. In addition, we included China in the broader group of Asian countries.
Table 6
Distribution of citations by country 
(“cultural” approach, “classic” database)
Group
Number 
of citations
Share
Share of main 
base citations, %
Western
462
58
44
Asian (excl. CIS), African and Middle Eastern
140
18
35
Russia
100
13
8
Eastern European (excl. CIS)
45
6
21
South American
26
3
31
CIS
22
3
16
Total
795
100
25Image 3. Distribution of citations by country 
(“cultural” approach, “classic” database)
    At the same time, we are sure that not all colleagues would agree with this distribution and, in general, this approach cannot be called strictly scientific, so the described problem, from our point of view, also requires discussion.
‘Leading’ national scientific organizations defined domestically 
and internationally 
    One of the curious findings of the study was the difference in the importance of domestic organizations at the national and international level (Table 7).
Table 7
Share of publications in classic database 
from main database by organization
Organization
Number of publ. 
in the main database
Number of publ. 
in “classic” database
Share of publ. belonging 
to the “classic” database, %
MSU
441
22
5
SPbU
270
44
16
KFU
222
3
1
HSE
178
69
39
RAS
150
5
3
RUDN
148
4
3
UrFU
51
6
12
TSU
51
4
8
RSSU
38
3
8
Plekhanov Univ
29
10
34
RANEPA
26
5
19
Total
1604
175
11
    
    Similarly, a significant difference is also observed at the author level: of the top 5 authors by number of publications across the entire database, none is even in the top 20 for the “classic” database. This point should also be taken into account when conducting research, as the focus on international or national databases can significantly change the scope of the research and its empirical object.
Conclusions and Discussion
    In our experience, the use of indicators of international scientific citation databases without a critical review of the data provided by them and multidimensional clarification of their content gives an extremely incomplete and inaccurate picture of the level and directions of development of national science. Of course, in addition to the above-mentioned issues, there are other, more obvious and trivial difficulties, including those related to differences in the spelling of Cyrillic names and titles, data dropouts, the speed of indexing of different sources, etc., which are simply unavoidable and are more technical than conceptual – unlike the issues we discuss in this article.
    If we look at the indicators of the number of articles and their citations, we see a rather bright picture and steady progressive growth, but a more careful and thoughtful work with the data reveals a completely different perspective: truly Russian articles in most cases remain invisible to the international scientific community, only publications in Q1 and – to a greater extent - various forms of international cooperation (collaborations, foreign funding or hiring foreign colleagues as collaborators) help to partially rectify this. At the same time, it can be seen that just as Russian articles are of little interest to foreign researchers, foreign articles do not particularly attract the attention of Russian ones. When referring to unfiltered general statistics, all these phenomena are not so noticeable.
    Undoubtedly, these results cannot be extrapolated to those areas of science in which Russian researchers traditionally hold leading positions. However, based on our observations, in many social and humanities disciplines, the situation largely corresponds to what is described in this article. It should also be noted that since 2022, the working conditions and publication activity of Russian researchers have changed to some extent. Nevertheless, the methodological approaches we have outlined have not lost their relevance or practical applicability.
    The conducted study also demonstrated that achieving meaningful results in assessing the international integration of national science is impossible without thorough methodological development at all stages of the analysis. Accurate definition of basic concepts, construction and cleaning of the publication dataset, consideration of the specifics of international collaborations, as well as distinguishing between genuinely and merely nominally international journals are essential prerequisites for increasing the accuracy of conclusions. The methodological approaches we have developed and tested can be used and adapted for similar studies in other disciplinary fields.
    It is impossible to propose any universal solutions that can prevent mistakes when conducting similar studies, but we would like at least to draw the attention of our colleagues to those issues that turned out to be important in the course of our work. Without in any way diminishing the importance of quantitative indicators and scientometrics, we would like to recall the need to integrate qualitatively selected data and “live” expertise into the process of assessing the presence or importance of national science at the international level, since in the course of our research many methodological decisions were conditioned by our involvement in the thematic field and the associated ability to look critically at the figures and see behind the lists of articles, journals and authors their real content.
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Authors
Natalia D. Trishchenko – Cand. Sc. (Philology), Senior Researcher, New Media and Communication Theory Chair, Journalism Department, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation
trishchenko.nataliia@yandex.ru
Mikhail I. Makeenko – Cand. Sc. (Philology), Associate Professor, Mass Media Theory and Economics Chair, Journalism Department, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation
makeenko.mikhail@smi.msu.ru
Igor V. Anisimov – Cand. Sc. (Philology), Senior Lecturer, Photojournalism and Media Technologies Chair, Journalism Department, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russian Federation
igor.anisimov@gmail.com
УДК [001.83:07] – 047.44
https://doi.org/10.33186/1027-3689-2025-8-52-71
Трансформация осведомлённости 
учёных и специалистов об альтметрике
О. М. Ударцева
ГПНТБ СО РАН, Новосибирск, Российская Федерация,
udartseva@spsl.nsc.ru, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6491-0412

