Some Features of the Citation Counts from Journals Indexed in Web of Science to Publications from Russian Translation Journals

Introduction As it was emphasized by Moed, H.F., Glänzel W. & Schmoch U. (2005) in their editors’ introduction to the Handbook of Quantitative Science and Technology Research: "A most important data source for analysis of the science system is the Science Citation Index (SCI) and related Citation Indexes published by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI–Thomson Scientific, Philadelphia, PA, USA), or, in a more recent version, ISI’s Web of Science." Due to this very competent opinion (supported of course by major part of scientists all over the world) it is very important for proper evaluation of the science and its development in Russia to investigate how publications in Russian journals indexed in SCI and how citations to these publications were counted and recorded in SCI in previous decades and is counted and recorded now in Web of Science (WoS). Some systematic problems with proper indexing and correct counting of citations to publications in Russian journals in SCI was revealed by brilliant founder of modern bibliometrics ("statistical bibliography") Eugene Garfield long time ago in 1974. The greatest problems (according to Garfield) occurred with so-called "translation journals": "The term Russian journals is used here as it is daily used in libraries in the United States. We are aware of its inadequacy and inaccuracy, but plead its convenience. A few of the journals are Slavic, but not Russian. The term Soviet journals might seem more appropriate, but it would not be. An important group of the journals considered is published outside the Soviet Union the so-called translation journals. Neither Russian nor Soviet, they are nevertheless the product of Russian and Soviet research. They also present, as we learned in this study, a formidable stumbling block in journal citation analysis of this type. I speak here only in terms of statistical bibliography as regards the translation journals." (Garfield, 1974). What was (and is now) the biggest problem with indexing and counting of citations of the "translation journals"? It was (and is now) the adopted by SCI (now Web of Science) policy of the counting of citations to original publications (articles, published in Russian) and to the English version of the same article, published in "translation journals". As it was found in the present research this policy were changed several times during the period of SCI existence and this policy can significantly affect the conclusions, which could be made about Russian science in many analytical reports and investigations, based on Web of Science data (see, for example, Albarrán et al., 2013). In this research we studied the style (the policy) of records for publications from Russian (and translation) journals and counting of citations to them in printed volumes of SCI in 1960-1998 years and compared these styles with the policy, adopted in the internet version of the successor of SCI (WoS) in 1990-es and now. It is possible to say after this investigation, that significant (sometimes huge) amount of citations (from the journals indexed in WoS) to Russian publications are not possible to find in WoS now without some complicated additional search. All these citations are not taken into account in many analytical reports about Russian science (especially about natural science such as physics, chemistry, biology etc.). At the same time it is not very difficult now to return back to the Garfield's old policy of records and calculations of the citations to Russian publications in translation journals, which could collect properly all citation using new possibilities of Internet linking of publications. (See, for example, UFN journal's web-site www.ufn.ru on which the citing articles are collected using CrossRef system (using Digital Objects Identifier DOI) or www.mathnet.ru site for more precise and elegant citations collecting (Zhizhchenko & Izaak, 2009; Chebukov et al, 2013)).