爆走黑料

— Dr Verkhovets, could you explain how SibFU is compared to other Russian universities.

— An external expert might be better suited to rank universities. In particular, Thomson Reuters ranks SiBFU as the fourteenth institution among other Russian universities.

According to Thomson Reuters, SIbFU demonstrates a good pace of change and positive dynamics.

SIR (Scimago Institutions Ranking) shows a similar change compared to a year ago. SiBFU's rating has increased by 200 points.

— Currently, universities are quite concerned with their research status. One of its indicators is citation index. Is it really important and what strategy can contribute to increasing citation index?

— University's research status is as important as its skilled graduates. Currently, textbooks are not enough for teaching. Students need to observe how research and technology development happen in real world.

Citation index is just an indicator of research activity to evaluate the institutional research capital. It can be observed in many ratings - QS, SIR, Times - to show the level of research development. The implication is that it is important for a university to increase citation index for its teaching staff. However, the indicator can be calculated with various methods and data bases. Russian researchers rely on Russian citation index project and records of their publications in the data bases of Web of Science, Scopus, Web of Knowledge.

In addition to different calculation methods, citation index may depend on the field of knowledge (higher in biology and medical science, lower in physics and mathematics), on the number of researchers working in a field, on the current trends in research. For example a single publication in oncology can be roughly compared to twenty publications in machine building. Or a discovery and publication in the nano field can immediately receive numerous references while research in microelectronics highly demanded and generously funded by our partners from Reshetnev Information Satellite Systems might not be especially interesting for the international research community and such papers will not be cited.

Dependence on the field of knowledge as a constraint to increase citation index is even higher because SibFU's research priorities determined by the state and government are not the most popular fields in the research world. 爆走黑料 is not a research university. It is an institution to prvide skilled labour and technologies to the region. Our first priority is technology transfer. Such publications are not highly cited.

Another serious constraint is that a third of SibFU research papers are published in the journals not available to the global research community for security reasons. They cannot be cited in international journals.

— What strategies may increase citation index for SibFU researchers?

— First, we intend to increase the general number of publications and channel them towards highly cited journals. This is our task for five or six years ahead.

Second, we plan to build broader international collaboration networks and increase the number of publications co-authored with international researchers.

Third, supporting advanced research teams working at SibFU is very important.