Russian experience with national rankings of academic journals: Mistakes, challenges, and prospects

Abstract

The article considers the excessive dependence of national Russian systems of scholarly periodicals on international scientometric databases. The problem has aggravated after the owners of the global citation indexes Web of Science and Scopus left the Russian market. We find out that national performance-based academic repositories show greater stability under the influence of external challenges. We analyze Russia’s experience in compiling national lists of academic journals, using a sample of publications on economics and related disciplines. We identify and classify the most common mistakes that were made during the introduction of journal metrics into the research performance evaluation system in Russia, and propose ways to correct them. Our findings reveal that the journal selection procedure has certain flaws resulting in the fact that some leading Russian journals, recognized at the international and national level, were not included in the “white lists”. We prove that a critical flaw in the ranking procedure of the journals included in national lists consists in the mixing of quartile metrics from different international databases; consequently, the logic of the distribution of publications that are similar in academic level and status was violated. Finally, we determine crucial qualitative criteria for evaluating academic journals and, relying on these criteria, propose three categories to rank publications on national lists. Our findings can be used in the state regulation of scientific activities of individual researchers and organizations.