To Be Published in the Best Journals

A database of articles and papers by HSE faculty staff published in international journals with a high citation index has been created at the HSE. Sergey Pekarsky, Deputy Head of the HSE Laboratory for Macroeconomic Analysis, and Martin Gilman, Director of the HSE Institute of Fundamental Interdisciplinary Research, told us about this database and its purpose .

- What does the database of publications by HSE faculty staff in international journals look like?

Martin Gilman:You can find links to the latest articles and papers by HSE staff on our website, provided by the Scopus search system. This is a very good resource which allows us to track new publications by our colleagues in international media. Now we are creating a database of all articles by HSE teachers which have been published in international journals. Thus our work is a logical and very important addition to the information already available.

- How are the publications selected?

Sergey Pekarsky:The articles should not have been published before 1994. The HSE was created in 1993, so before 1994 the publications of our colleagues were not directly associated with the HSE. The process of gathering information has been laborious and has taken a long time. On one hand, via deans, we tried to get in touch with teachers who potentially might have been authors of such publications and asked them to send us information. In addition to that, we manually searched using systems like Web of Science, trying to find the works of our colleagues. So now we are sure that the overwhelming majority of publications by our employees in prestigious international journals has been put in our lists.

- Which publications and which journals have been put on your list?

Sergey Pekarsky

S. Pekarsky:The concept, approved by the working group from the HSE Institute of Fundamental Interdisciplinary Research (IFIR), included the creation of two lists. The first could be described as a list of publications in the most renowned and important Western journals. We took Impact Factor as a criterion of a journal's influence in the world science. We took journals with an IF of over 0.5 - and that allowed us to choose the most advanced journals. The first list is the list of the most prestigious publications by HSE staff. Unfortunately, there are not too many of them, there are 56 works in the list at the moment. That's why we have compiled the second list, which includes journals with a lower or even zero IF. There is another useful tool, the Social Sciences Citation Index. If a journal has such an index, we include it in the second list. The second list is longer:now there are 104 publications in it. From time to time the IFIR working group can review the list of the journals. For example, despite the fact that several of our respected colleagues had publications in the journal 'Problems of Economic Transition', the working group decided to strike it off the list, since a large number of articles and papers in it are of a rather low level, not, I hasten to add, any of those from our colleagues. The same fate faced the Sotsiologicheskie Issledovaniya journal.

- Who needs it and why?

M. Gilman:The HSE is seeking to become a large international research university, and this is stated in the University strategy. But what can we do to make these ambitions reality? This is a serious challenge for the university administration and staff. How do we understand that we are becoming what we want to become? What tools can we use for this? Most researchers acknowledge several international university rankings. The problem is that the HSE isn't included in any of them. The first thing that affects a university's rank is its Impact Factor. All journals with a high IF are in English. There are no ranked journals in Russian, even in mathematics. That means that our colleagues should publish their works in prestigious English-language journals. When a university's rank becomes high enough, its researchers start to be invited to international conferences, it then becomes easier to win international grants for research, easier to create partner projects and to attract foreign professors and the best students from all over the world. It is important to show our colleagues that this is possible. And what will help are not books, not symposiums, but articles.

- What does the database look like?

S. Pekarsky:At the moment it is just two files. The publications in them are divided by subject:Economics, Management etc. But we are planning to create a real database with a user friendly search engine, automatic updating and other technical facilities.

- Will database users have access to these articles?

S. Pekarsky:The HSE has access to resources where high-IF journals are available. So I think that in most cases users will have access to all the journals on the lists.

Sergey Stepanishev, HSE News Service