Measuring excellence in Russia: Highly cited papers, leading institutions, patterns of national and international collaboration

In this study, we discover Russian “centers of excellence” and explore patterns of their collaboration with each other and with foreign partners. Highly cited papers serve as a proxy for “excellence” and coauthored papers as a measure of collaborative efforts. We find that currently research institutes (of the Russian Academy of Sciences as well as others) remain the key players despite recent government initiatives to stimulate university science. The contribution of the commercial sector to high-impact research is negligible. More than 90% of Russian highly cited papers involve international collaboration, and Russian institutions often do not play a dominant role. Partnership with U.S., German, U.K., and French scientists increases markedly the probability of a Russian paper becoming highly cited. Patterns of national (“intranational”) collaboration in world-class research differ significantly across different types of organizations; the strongest ties are between three nuclear/particle physics centers. Finally, we draw a coauthorship map to visualize collaboration between Russian centers of excellence. Received January 28, 2013; revised July 31, 2013; accepted August 1, 2013 This is a preprint of an article published in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 65, No. 11, pp.2321–2330 http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.23093. This preprint has been updated to reflect changes in the final version. Recommended citation: Pislyakov, V., & Shukshina, E. (2014). Measuring Excellence in Russia: Highly cited papers, leading institutions, patterns of national and international collaboration. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 65(11), 2321–2330. DOI: 10.1002/asi.23093.