A new database of Russian scientific journals - Russian Science Citation Index - is integrated with the Web of Science platform (Thomson Reuters). Lists of scientific journals rinz Journals from the rinz core

At the end of the 19th century, the first attempts were made in the United States to systematize published scientific works and create their databases. In our country, work in this direction began after the end of the Great Patriotic War in the 50s of the twentieth century. The current list of scientific publications was compiled in 2006.

RSCI list

RSCI stands for “Russian Science Citation Index”. It is a list of scientific periodicals that have ever cited or published the works of Russian scientists, as well as their colleagues from the countries of the former USSR. The database archives are free to use, publicly available and posted on the website https://elibrary.ru/.

Order publication of an article

First of all, the list of RSCI journals is intended to make it easier for students and scientists to find information that interests them on a particular topic. However, it also performs another important function: by analyzing RSCI journals, you can obtain important statistical data on the number of published works.

List of periodicals from the RSCI core

When the system was just being formed, journals included in the RSCI did not undergo any verification. To be included in the list, the publisher simply had to submit an application to the system administration. This led to the fact that many publications appeared on the list that did not have any significance for science.

In order to facilitate the search for periodicals, the creators of the index set a goal to create a list of journals within the RSCI that have the highest value. For this publication, they undergo a special examination. It is being carried out jointly with another similar project created by the American company Thomson Reuters. The set of verified publications that are reliable sources of information is called the “core” of the project. https://elibrary.ru/titles.asp?corerisc=checked

Garbage magazines

Garbage publications mean those that publish the works of scientists for money, without proper scientific review. De facto, they charge money without any justification. Many people go to publish their work in such a publication to obtain an academic degree, since this requires having published works.

Order publication of an article

Since the control over periodicals entering the database is quite weak, such garbage magazines sometimes appear in it. RSCI is working to identify them and exclude them from the list. A list of journals excluded from the RSCI is maintained. A list of all journals, conferences and books excluded from the RSCI can be found at the link: https://elibrary.ru/books.asp?show_option=excluded&booktype=&sortorder=1&order=1

For students

Directions

The database includes publications in a wide variety of areas. Among them:

• RSCI journals in economics. The list contains 2148 such publications https://elibrary.ru/titles.asp.

• RSCI journals on pedagogy and psychology (screen). They are listed in the RSCI 1921 and the pedagogical publication “Psychological Science and Education” is recognized as the most relevant according to the results of the examination.

In addition to these, the index contains publications on many other branches of knowledge.

Thomson Reuters and eLibrary.ru have included a database of the most influential Russian scientific journals in the Web of Science platform
By 2016, the database of the best Russian scientific journals (the core of the collection of the Russian Science Citation Index RSCI), hosted on the Web of Science platform in the form of the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI), will include more than 600 journals that have significant scientific value for Russia and the world. scientific community. Such interaction will facilitate the accessibility of Russian scientific journals, thereby increasing their authority in the international information space.

Moscow, Russia, December 17, 2015. The Research and Intellectual Property division of Thomson Reuters, a leading global provider of analytical information for business and professionals, and the scientific electronic library eLibrary.ru (the developer and operator of the project) announced today that RSCI is being hosted on the Web of Science platform as a separate, but completely integrated database. (Web of Science is the world's leading search platform for the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities).

Integration of the core of the RSCI collection, traditionally strong in the natural sciences, with the Web of Science platform will significantly increase the accessibility of Russian journals in the international scientific arena. In addition, this will improve the quality of Russian scientific publications and bring them to the level of international standards. From now on, tens of millions of international users of the Web of Science platform will have direct access to RSCI, and Russian research will be displayed on an equal basis with research from other countries.

The assessment and careful selection of Russian scientific journals was carried out by the Working Group based on the results of a multi-level examination. Members of the Working Group headed the relevant thematic (according to the subject headings of Web of Science) expert councils. It included:

• A. I. Grigoriev (chairman of the working group), vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, chairman of the Scientific Publishing Council of the Russian Academy of Sciences, scientific director of the research center of the Institute of Medical and Biological Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences (biological and other natural sciences - interdisciplinary journals)
• A. A. Baranov, Director of the Scientific Center for Children's Health (medical and health sciences)
• L. M. Gokhberg, First Vice-Rector of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Director of the Institute of Statistical Research and Economics of Knowledge of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (Social Sciences and Humanities - social and humanities)
• G. O. Eremenko, General Director of the National Electronic Library (NEL) (advisory council on bibliometrics)
• E. N. Kablov, President of the Association of State Scientific Centers, General Director of the Federal State Unitary Enterprise State Scientific Center "All-Russian Institute of Aviation Materials" (engineering and technical sciences)
• V.V. Kozlov, Vice-President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Director of the Mathematical Institute named after. V. A. Steklov of the Russian Academy of Sciences (mathematical, computer and information sciences)
• Yu. F. Lachuga, Academician-Secretary of the Department of Agricultural Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences (agricultural sciences)
• N.V. Sobolev, senior researcher at the Institute of Geology and Mineralogy named after. V. S. Sobolev RAS (geological sciences)
• A. R. Khokhlov, Vice-Rector of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov (Physical sciences - physical sciences and Chemical sciences - chemical sciences)
• A. Ya. Nazarenko, NISO RAS, scientific secretary of the working group.

Leaders of thematic areas formed expert councils, involving leading scientists and representatives of various scientific organizations (specialized departments and research centers of the Russian Academy of Sciences, federal and research universities, state research centers, etc.) in the examination.

Each member of the Working Group coordinated the organization of the examination of journals in one of the main scientific areas. The decision to include the journal in RSCI was made by the Working Group in accordance with the conclusions of thematic expert councils obtained on the basis of the following information:

• formal criteria for selecting journals;
• bibliometric indicators of the journal (more than 30 indicators), calculated in the RSCI;
• results of evaluation of journals by experts in the main thematic areas;
• public examination of journals by leading Russian scientists.

During the public examination, 10% of scientists with the highest bibliometric indicators were selected for each scientific area. Each expert assessed journals within the scope of their field, distributing scientific publications into four corresponding quality levels. In total, 12,800 expert questionnaires and 240,000 journal evaluations were submitted, and 2,800 expert comments were compiled to justify the evaluation or clarify the thematic heading of the journal.

Thus, today RSCI contains information about 512 Russian scientific journals that meet the requirements of the Web of Science and play an important role for the Russian and international scientific community.

Oleg Utkin, Head of Thomson Reuters IP & Science in Russia, said: “We are honored to host the Russian Science Citation Index database of the best Russian scientific journals on the Web of Science platform and familiarize the international scientific community with the results of Russian researchers. This association will make it possible to evaluate the results of scientific research in the country and will further increase the prestige of Russian science in the world. Scientific organizations, researchers and regulators will be able to analyze Russian publications using the gold standards of the Web of Science platform in the field of research and analytics.”

Find out more about the Web of Science platform in English or Russian (http://thomsonreuters.ru/).

List of thematic journals on psychiatry included in the Web of Science:

1. Bulletin of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences
2. Narcology issues
3. Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry. S.S. Korsakova
4. Review of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology named after. V.M. Bekhtereva
5. Psychiatry and psychopharmacotherapy
6. Russian Psychiatric Journal
7. Social and clinical psychiatry

The beginning of the “Russian Science Citation Index” project can be considered in 2005, when a Russian mechanism for assessing and analyzing scientific publications was developed on the site of the scientific electronic library. The goal of the project was to create an objective indicator of the citation rate of domestic scientists. The number of publications before the start of the Russian index that were included in international rankings was only 10th of all published.

What is RSCI

The Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) system is a domestic database of citations of fundamental, academic and applied research.

Currently, the database archive contains more than 12 million different publications; over 600 thousand scientists, researchers, and teachers are actively publishing their works.

11 thousand scientific organizations related to all branches of science are registered on the elibrary.ru platform. At least 3,000 new texts are added to the RSCI list every day.

The basis of the citation system is the indexing of all printed and electronic publications published in the specialized literature. Each publication of the RSCI list has an abstract index, which includes:

• output,
• author of the text,
• meaningful words,
• area/areas of study,
• brief description of the article,
• list of sources.

The RSCI system solves a number of important scientific problems:

1. analyze and evaluate citations of domestic scientists, professors, and researchers;
2. create a single complete list of scientific publications, an authoritative independent database;
3. to create a multifunctional search system, a navigation system for articles, publications, and specialized magazines.

The Russian Citation Index is the main citation system in Russia today, which includes all information about various studies (monographs, methodological manuals, conference collections, articles, dissertations). The RSCI database is freely available.

Official site.

Figure 1 – Main page of the RSCI website

The difference between the Higher Attestation Commission and the RSCI
Some people confuse the list of journals of the Higher Attestation Commission and the list of the Russian index, which is fundamentally wrong. Journalism included in the scientific database and the Higher Attestation Commission are two separate catalogues.

The scientific database register has been expanded to include the most authoritative periodicals in Russia.

The citation index itself is a tool that makes it possible to find out the level of periodicals, objective criteria of its importance and popularity (impact factor).

Every scientist or research organization strives for high citation rates in the RSCI, as an assessment of effectiveness.

But applicants for an academic degree need to publish their articles only in those journals that are approved by the Higher Attestation Commission.

The list of the certification commission is much smaller. A journal included in the Russian citation database is not automatically included in the Higher Attestation Commission.

Impact factor (IF) is a quantitative indicator of the value of a journal, its importance and significance. There are different approaches to calculating the IF: for two, three, five previous years. Many organizations define the factor in their own developed ways.

The impact factor of Russian journals is determined using the classical method:

IF = a/b, where

a is the number of cited journal articles for the previous conditional period (2 or 5 years),
b – the number of all publications for the same conditional period.

The Russian Citation Index calculates two sets of IFs:

• in the first, the factor for b is all links in all sources, including texts without clear authorship;
• in the second IF, only original articles from domestic journals are taken to calculate b.

What is the RSCI core

In 2015, an agreement was concluded with Web of Science that a Russian database of cited articles would be hosted on their site. This includes the most successful domestic publications. The best journals, as well as individual articles included in the international database, form the Core of the Russian citation index.
The development stage assumed that the “core” would include the TOP 1000 domestic journals. This TOP is not static; every year, journals that meet a high level are selected.

Today the core consists of almost 700 copies of periodicals

The difference between the domestic and foreign citation index is that the foreign index counts only “its” publications, while the Russian science citation index has access to all information.
If a graduate student, young scientist or teacher needs an article not for “extras”, but for a serious argument in the defense of a candidate’s thesis or a deep immersion in science, then it is important to strive to publish the work in the TOP.

How to get to the RSCI

Registration in the electronic library RSCI elibrary ru will be required if necessary:

1. gain access to all available materials in the electronic library;
2. manage site navigation (save search history, customize the panel, etc.);
3. create a personal selection of texts, publications, collections;
4. Log in to the site, post the publication as its author.

To get into the search engine, you must first register as a user. This will make it possible to log in and access the entire RSCI database.

The Russian Science Citation Index can be used as an assessment tool after undergoing secondary registration, already as an author.

It will be possible to enter the database to use new services (publish or index your own article, calculate the index) no earlier than in a week (this is how long the process of checking your profile and confirming registration lasts).

Scientific journals RSCI

The electronic scientific library of the RSCI includes almost 7,000 titles. Of these on the elibrary site:

• 5600 publications are presented in full,
• 4800 journals have open free access.

The RSCI list is regularly updated and expanded.
There is an index on the site - “search for magazines”. Various parameters allow you to quickly find the publication you are looking for (Fig. 2).

Figure 2 – Catalog of journals included in the database

The RSCI list includes a variety of periodicals, which includes (Fig. 3):

1. highly specialized (from astronomy to linguistics),
2. multidisciplinary journals (technical, humanities or in all areas of science).

Figure 3 – Thematic list of journals

RSCI Conference

Since 2011, scientific conferences of the RSCI have been held, at which various aspects of scientific activity are studied. On the official website you can find information about both past events and upcoming ones.

Some universities hold similar events, based on the results of which the most relevant materials, outstanding presentations, and conclusions are compiled into a general collection. The publisher of such collections strives to be indexed in the scientific citation database, but the publications do not always undergo strict verification.

Publishing the results of a conference of a university in the RSCI is a criterion of high quality

Publication in the RSCI collection allows young scientists to increase their citation index. That is why not only professionals and narrow specialists, but also university teachers and graduate students who are passionate about science strive to get into them.

E-library for authors

• through regular user registration, after which fill out an additional form (personal profile);
• through the publishing house or organization where the author works or teaches (Fig. 4).

Figure 4 – Registration in the RSCI

1. Enter “manually” a complete abstract description of the published manuscript.
2. Use a template indicating a link to an article already published on another site (if information about it is already in the database).
3. Add an article using the DOI code (if the journal uses this identification method). The article search procedure, in this case, is automatic.

How to find out an author's citation index

Determining the number of cited articles is an important factor for a scientist. The RSCI citation index is calculated automatically by the electronic library server. How to find out the RSCI index:

• through the search “My citations” in your personal profile,
• through the “Author Index”, after filling out the full name column.

To find out your H-index or your colleague's H-index, follow the author search link. Enter your last name or other known search parameters. At the output, you will immediately be able to see information about the citation of the author.

Next to the citation status of publications there is a colored icon; by clicking on it you can get detailed detailed information.

SCIENCE INDEX system

In 2011, an analytical part was added to the general database - the SCIENCE INDEX system for organizations and publishing houses. The institution enters into an agreement, after which it can:

1. add not only a new publication, but also monographs, results and conclusions of your own conferences, announcements of upcoming events at your institution;
2. manage the entire set of tools necessary for analyzing and evaluating publications (both at the level of the organization and department, and at the level of the individual scientist);
3. carry out the most detailed analysis and calculation of scientometric indicators (individual and complex);
4. independent control over publication activity.

The RSCI system requires additional registration, which is possible only after a thorough check. If the publications of the author or publication are approved by the Higher Attestation Commission, then they will be able to do this without difficulty. A separate section in the personal user section contains the paragraph “register in the system as the author of publications” (Fig. 5).

When concluding a contract, a scientific organization specifies in the contract which of its employees will coordinate work with the citation index.

Author ID and SPIN code of the author

• Author ID
• SPIN code

An individual AuthorID is assigned to each registered author. This personal number allows you to identify a person in the database, take part in scientific events, apply for grants, and publish in specialized periodicals.

ID search:

1. login to the author’s personal page,
2. The ID indicator will be under the full name.

With the introduction of the SCIENCE INDEX system, it became possible to independently analyze publication activities (clarify lists, check publications, calculate the index).

This system requires additional registration, after which the author is assigned a SPIN code.

The SPIN code definition can also be found in the personal profile, where its publication activity is reflected.

The RSCI covers an impressive volume of scientific publications by domestic authors. All forecasts indicate that in the near future the RSCI database of the Russian Science Citation Index will only increase. An important difference from international systems is that you can register on the domestic platform for free and have access to almost the entire citation database. The main functions of the Russian parameter are the analysis and evaluation of publications by Russian scientists, as well as the source and search system of all specialized periodicals.

In September 2014, Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics) and the Scientific Electronic Library (SEL) entered into an agreement to host the core of the best Russian journals from the RSCI on the Web of Science platform. The goal of the project is to highlight the best Russian journals in the RSCI and place them on the Web of Science platform in the form of a separate Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) database, similar to what was done with the Chinese and Latin American science citation indices. According to this agreement, by the end of 2015, up to 1000 leading Russian journals in all scientific fields (all issues over the last 10 years) will be included in this database.

Placing the RSCI on the Web of Science platform and identifying mutual citations between publications in the Web of Science and RSCI will significantly improve the visibility of Russian scientific journals in the international information space, which is especially important for the social sciences and humanities. For Russian journals included in RSCI, this will be a kind of springboard for their promotion to the core of Web of Science.

The selection of journals will be carried out in two stages. At the first stage, a preliminary list of the best Russian journals will be generated, selected using bibliometric indicators and formal criteria. At the second stage, this list will be refined through expert assessment and public discussion.

A Working Group has been created to organize work on the assessment and selection of Russian scientific journals. Chairman of the working group: Chairman of NISO RAS, Vice-President of the RAS A.I. Grigoriev. Deputy Chairman: 1st Vice-Rector of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Director of the Institute of Statistical Research and Economics of Knowledge L.M. Gokhberg. The working group will include representatives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, HSE, NEB, leading universities and the State Scientific Center.

Identifying the core of the best journals in the RSCI will also make it possible to solve other problems related to the analysis and assessment of the effectiveness of scientific research in the country. Unlike the RSCI database, which indexes more than 4,000 Russian journals and which aims to provide the most complete coverage of all publications by Russian scientists, only the best Russian publications will be selected in the RSCI. Getting into this database for a journal, author or scientific organization will be a criterion for a certain level of quality of scientific research.

This project will also contribute to:

1. Improving the quality of Russian scientific journals by bringing them to international standards.

2. The growth of bibliometric indicators of Russian journals in the Web of Science and integral indicators of Russia as a whole by identifying links to Russian-language versions of journals and increasing the visibility and citation of Russian journals in the world.

3. Creation of a system for assessing and monitoring the quality of scientific journals, combining the use of bibliometric information and expert assessment.

4. Improving the system for assessing the effectiveness of scientific activity based on taking into account articles in the collection of the best Russian journals (RSCI core).

Why was the decision made to exclude a group of journals from the RSCI?

The Russian Science Citation Index was created not only as a national register of publications by Russian scientists, but also as a tool for assessing scientific activity. That is, the RSCI has two main tasks: a) collecting information from all sources in a single database about all publications of Russian scientists, and b) calculating statistical indicators to assess the publication activity of scientists and scientific organizations based on the citation of publications.

The RSCI copes quite successfully with solving the first problem. Now more than 6 thousand Russian journals are indexed there. The total number of publications by Russian scientists in the database exceeded 11 million, and every year one and a half million new publications are added (of which approximately 800 thousand are publications for the last year, the rest are archival). Of these 800 thousand, approximately 450 thousand are publications in scientific journals, the rest are monographs, articles in collections, conference proceedings, patents, dissertations, etc.

But in recent years, more and more difficulties have arisen in solving the second problem. This is due to the rapid growth in the number of journals published in Russia, which in words position themselves as peer-reviewed scientific publications, but in reality simply provide paid services for the publication of the author’s works without any peer review. Anything can be published in such a journal, including any anti-scientific nonsense, since there is no input quality control of publications from a scientific point of view. There is also no control over the reasonableness and validity of citations in articles. For example, you can easily make at least a hundred references in each article to your previous works or the works of your co-authors, even if they are not thematically related to the content of this work and are not mentioned at all in the text. Increasing your bibliometric indicators in this way is, as they say, a matter of technology.

To combat this problem, the RSCI proposes to use various modifications of indicators, including those taking into account self-citation, citation by co-authors, contract citation, etc., but the methods for calculating them are becoming more and more complex and using them in practice is not always advisable. And not everything can be corrected with indicators alone.

The saddest thing in this story is that the metastases of such unscrupulous practices have begun to affect quite decent journals, the founders of which are universities and scientific organizations. Moreover, many scientists and teachers have already begun to be quite tolerant of publications in such journals. This does not cause any indignation or rejection among their colleagues.

You can easily predict the further development of the situation if you do nothing. The share of non-peer-reviewed publications in the RSCI will increase, which will lead to the fact that the indicators calculated from the RSCI database will no longer be able to be used to evaluate scientific activity, since, due to artificial manipulations, they will no longer reflect the real picture of the scientific significance of scientists and scientific organizations and magazines. As a result, the RSCI will be excluded from all regulatory documents related to the assessment and monitoring of scientific activities. It will be replaced either by the recently formed RSCI core, or in general only by international scientific citation databases. Then those who today protest against the exclusion from the RSCI of unscrupulous publications in which they had the imprudence to publish will really have serious problems. After all, many of them have no publications at all in prestigious international journals.

To avoid such a pessimistic scenario, it is necessary to introduce restrictions on the inclusion of non-peer-reviewed publications in the RSCI and exclude journals that have already been included there that do not meet the criteria of scientific and publishing ethics. The fact that this will be done was first announced a year ago at the conference “International Scientific Publishing - 2016: Solving the Problems of Publishing Ethics, Reviewing and Preparation of Publications.” During the year, work was carried out to analyze and evaluate journals indexed in the RSCI for their compliance with generally accepted criteria for a scientific peer-reviewed publication. As a result of this analysis, they were selected, which were recently excluded from the RSCI.

The practice of excluding journals from scientific citation databases is not new. Journals are excluded from both Web of Science and Scopus. For example, those that do not meet the rules of publishing ethics, artificially inflate their indicators, or are of too low quality have recently been removed from Scopus.

How are journals excluded from the RSCI technically, and what happens to the performance of scientists who published in excluded journals?

Technically, the magazine is not going away. Licensing agreements with publishers are not terminated, moreover, the publisher can, if desired, continue to provide information about new issues. But all articles from excluded journals and citations from them are no longer taken into account when calculating bibliometric indicators in the RSCI. To assess publication activity on the platform, the site now has three different levels:

1) RSCI core. This includes all publications in journals currently indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus and RSCI (Russian Science Citation Index on the Web of Science platform) databases. In addition, the core will include the best monographs and proceedings of the most respected scientific conferences, selected based on strict peer review. The RSCI core is recommended for assessing the highest quality component of the array of publications by Russian scientists.

2) RSCI. After clearing out unscrupulous publications, this will include only publications in peer-reviewed scientific journals, as well as non-journal publications that meet the requirements of publishing and scientific ethics. It is recommended for analyzing publication activity in all scientific areas, including those where the level of domestic research does not yet reach the world level.

3) Scientific electronic library. Various publications that are related to scientific activity, but are not scientific in the strict sense of the word, can be additionally posted here, including abstract, popular science, information and socio-political magazines, as well as magazines that cannot be classified as peer-reviewed. These publications do not participate in the statistical assessment of scientific activity in the RSCI.

Accordingly, the main bibliometric indicators (number of publications, number of citations and Hirsch index) are now calculated separately for each category, which makes it possible to compare them and understand the publications in which sources they are formed. All these indicators are presented on the page for analyzing the scientist’s publication activity. In the lists of author publications and citations, you can now also display publications or links separately for each category.

Why couldn’t it have been possible to leave the already loaded issues of excluded journals in the RSCI or to exclude only articles by individual authors who were inflating their indicators?

The logic behind the operation of scientific citation databases is based on the fact that they do not select individual publications. They are physically unable to do this with such input streams of publications. The selection takes place at the level of scientific journals, and the evaluation of individual articles is carried out by the editors of scientific journals. Journals are a kind of distributed specialized centers for examining incoming manuscripts and selecting the highest quality and scientifically significant works for publication. If this most important function of the editorial office of a scientific journal stops working, the entire coherent system of bibliometric assessment in scientific citation databases collapses. Therefore, the global practice is that entire journals are added to the database and no longer indexed, rather than individual articles. It is assumed that if experts have selected a journal for inclusion in indexing, then they trust all publications in this journal, since the editors of the journal guarantee their quality at an acceptable level.

All journals excluded from the RSCI at this stage, from the very beginning of their publication, carried out their activities with obvious violations of scientific publishing ethics, therefore all their issues were removed from the RSCI. Is this fair? If we analyze the composition of the authors who published articles in journals excluded from the RSCI, it turns out that 80% of them published no more than three articles in these journals, and half - one article at all. If these authors have other publications, then one or two articles will not have much impact on their performance. At the same time, there is a category of authors for whom the exclusion of these journals will be much more noticeable - about 4 thousand scientists published 10 or more articles in them. There are also anti-heroes here, who have 100 or more publications and several thousand citations in the excluded journals. A detailed analysis of the publication activity of these scientists confirms their use of publications in these journals for the purpose of artificially inflating their indicators. When an author has more than 500 publications in 2016, and these publications already have more than 1,400 citations, and at the same time the core of the RSCI is zero, and the H-index is approaching 70, then this speaks not only of a massive violation of publication ethics, but also in general about the loss of common sense in the pursuit of indicators.

Now let's assume that all these publications would remain in the RSCI and imagine two scientists with a high H-index. The first has published throughout his life in highly rated scientific journals, and his H-index truly reflects his real scientific level. The second one followed the path of least resistance and in a couple of years built up the same H-index for himself through publications in dubious journals and proceedings of correspondence conferences. It turns out that with a formal approach, both of these scientists equally apply for the same positions, titles, bonuses, grants, etc. Is this fair? The interests of which of these scientists should be supported by the RSCI in this situation? It seems to us that the answer is obvious.

How to determine whether a journal is peer-reviewed and whether it will be excluded from the RSCI in the future?

The main criteria by which one can determine whether a journal is peer-reviewed and whether it meets the requirements of the Russian Science Citation Index are given in sufficient detail in. Many similar recommendations can be found on the Internet. First of all, you need to rely on common sense and not fall for dubious advertising that promises everything quickly, cheaply and with a guaranteed result. If you still have doubts, ask more experienced colleagues whether this journal is authoritative in your scientific field.

Yes, you can try to retract an article from the journal, revise it and send it to one of the peer-reviewed publications. In this case, it is necessary to indicate that the article was published earlier, but was withdrawn and revised. This will allow you to avoid later problems with text duplication when checking for incorrect borrowing.

Will work continue to clear the RSCI of unscrupulous publications and how?

This work is very important and will certainly continue. According to our estimates, among the six thousand journals indexed in the RSCI, at least 1000 journals do not conduct any review of incoming manuscripts at all, that is, only a third have been excluded from the RSCI so far. Also, numerous correspondence conferences and collective monographs will be excluded from the RSCI - very dubious genres of scientific publications that have recently become widespread in Russia, and in fact are a quick way to publish an article without any peer review.

How will new journals be included in the RSCI now?

Now there will no longer be automatic inclusion of new journals in the RSCI. Each journal will go through an internal evaluation system. If a new journal is created by a reputable publishing house that already has journals in the RSCI, and is not involved in any stories related to violations of publishing ethics, then it will begin to be indexed from the first issue.

If the publishing house is new or there were questions about its previous publications, then the journal may begin to post issues on the website, but they will not be immediately taken into account in the RSCI.

It is possible to significantly reduce the time it takes to consider the inclusion of a journal in the RSCI if the journal provides texts of reviews of them along with descriptions of articles. These reviews will be posted on the article description page. This will not only confirm the fact of reviewing articles, but also evaluate the quality of this review.

Can a journal already indexed in the RSCI switch to a model with open posting of reviews?

Yes it is possible. To do this, the journal publisher must finalize agreements with publication authors and reviewers, obtaining their consent to publish reviews in the public domain. What might be the interest of authors and reviewers in this?

First, it may be important for the author, as well as for the journal, to have public evidence of peer review of their work. Secondly, posting reviews can become an incentive, a kind of catalyst for colleagues to discuss the results of their work and search for new directions for further research.

For a reviewer, open reviews are essentially a publication of the results of his hard work. And if the editors choose the option of disclosing information about the reviewer of this article, then this also means respect from colleagues and recognition of his qualifications by the scientific community. Experienced editors know that some reviewers write very interesting and detailed reviews that are useful not only for the author of the manuscript under review. Their publication may provide a new perspective on the interpretation of the results obtained and new approaches to solving the problems raised in the study.

How will the process of posting open reviews be technically organized?

Review texts are posted on the publication description page. Access to them is open to all scientists registered in the Science Index system. Along with the text of the review, the editors provide information about the reviewer (full name and ID of the review author) and the date of the review. The editors of the journal themselves determine whether this information will be publicly available or not.

The editors also decide independently whether all reviews are opened or only the most interesting ones will be shown. If the decision to publish an article was made by the editorial board independently, without the involvement of external experts, then the text of this decision may be provided instead of a review. It is also permitted to publish not the full text of the review, but individual excerpts from it. The review may be adjusted or compiled by the editors from several reviews. In addition, in some cases it may be of interest to publish the authors' responses to reviews.

Scientists registered in the Science Index system can also write their reviews and evaluate the level of this work after its publication. In addition, they are given the opportunity to discuss the results of their work and discuss with the authors of the publication.

How can I retract an article if it has already been published in a journal?

Withdrawal of an article (retraction) is carried out upon an official request from the editors of the journal. In this case, the initiator of retraction can be either the team of authors or the editors themselves. The most common causes of retraction are:

Detection of plagiarism in a publication;

Duplication of an article in several publications;

Detection of falsifications in the work (for example, manipulation of experimental data);

The discovery of serious errors in the work (for example, incorrect interpretation of results), which calls into question its scientific value.

To retract an article, the editors must indicate the reason for retraction (in case of detection of plagiarism, indicating the sources of borrowing), as well as the date of retraction. Examples of retracted articles can be viewed or. Retracted articles and references from them are excluded from the RSCI and are not included in the calculation of indicators.