The Russian Conference Outbreak: Description, Causes and Possible Policy Measures

Abstract

This paper (in Russian) deals with the topic of excessive growth of conference papers of Russian authors in Scopus and Web of Science databases. We present international comparisons of publication, citation and internationalization trends for conference papers for 50 countries to show that anomalous growth for Russia in recent years is coupled with rapidly decreasing normalized citation and internationalization rates. We proceed to sectoral analysis to show that the universities are mostly affected, not the Russian academy of sciences, and hypothesize that such behavior stems from increased government evaluation pressureand simplistic bibliometrics usage, which conforms to the trend observed in other countries. The paper also includes a brief review of the market for organizing local conferences and indexing them in the Web of Science and Scopus via major international publishers, and the notion of virtual (pre-epidemic) predatory conferences. We conclude with several policy recommendations.