RSCI – what is it and how to work with it

RSCI – what is it and how to work with it

The Russian Science Citation Index is a citation database. Publication of articles in the publications of the RSCI is a condition for the author to get into this database. This allows you to place and correct your articles in the database. All publishing activities of a scientist are reflected in the citation index and a more objective indicator, called the Hirsch index.

This indicator is one of the important criteria for the productivity of scientific activity of the teaching staff of universities and institutes. Since the RSCI is hosted on the basis of the NEB, better known to the general public as an e-library, the concepts of the RSCI and e-library are very often identified, for example, scientific articles in the e-library are still considered scientific publications in the RSCI.

What is RSCI

Until 2017, the identification of e-library and RSCI was considered normal, since all peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed scientific articles from the e-library database immediately fell into the RSCI. Therefore, the urgent publication of an article in the RSCI was not a big problem. This made it possible for unscrupulous businessmen from science to wind up citation indices. However, in 2017, an audit of the RSCI publications was carried out, as a result of which more than 300 journals were removed from the RSCI database. And according to the assurances of the management, the work to clear the citation index from pseudo-journals will continue in the future, that is, it will be carried out constantly and on a regular basis.

It should be noted that part of the RSCI publications, which is most preferable for novice authors. We are talking about collections of scientific papers and materials of scientific conferences. Collections of scientific papers, as a rule, are published by universities and universities under the guidance of professors and teachers who provide a good scientific level.

The situation with scientific conferences has changed for the better. With the rejection of one-day correspondence conferences that published their unreviewed abstracts and reports in the RSCI, the level of these publications in this database has increased significantly. Although it would be premature to talk about the eradication of low-quality products.

What is left of the e-library? The base of the Scientific Electronic Library will contain publications that can be attributed to scientific activity, but they are not, strictly speaking, scientific, that is, they do not belong to peer-reviewed journals. These are popular science, information, socio-political publications. They are not taken into account in the static assessment of publication activity in the RSCI, which opens up good opportunities for students to publish RSCI articles.

Decisions were made to organize the Science Index based on WoS and to create the RSCI Core. Science Index, being a more advanced information and analytical system, had more features than the RSCI system. First of all, we are talking about complex calculations of scientometric indicators, which makes it possible to more accurately assess the publication activity of scientists and the scientific effectiveness of individual teams and organizations.

RSCI Today

Today, the updated RSCI is reaching a new level. Thomson Reuters has launched the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) project, thanks to which a new database of the best Russian journals has been created on the Web of Science platform. These publications are also indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection and Scopus.

The core of the RSCI was formed, where at the initial stage articles from three citation bases were included: Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus, Russian Science Citation Index. Now, on the basis of the RSCI core, the bibliometric indicators of the authors of all published works are calculated.

Along with the replenishment of these databases with new journals that meet the established requirements, those publications that no longer meet these requirements will be deleted from them. Nevertheless, these logs will retain the right to restore in the databases when the deficiencies are eliminated.

The publication of scientific articles in the e-library has lost its former significance today, as proof of their scientific value. However, the NEB itself remains the most authoritative database and still retains a huge scientific, informational and educational potential, without which it is difficult to imagine the development of science in our country. And we are glad that our website, the Portal of Russian Science, contributes to this. This was confirmed by the award of the 5th place in the All-Russian business rating for 2018 in the nomination “publishing books”.