The international component of the Unified State Register of Scholarly Publication Channels: new questions and unresolved issues
https://doi.org/10.24069/sep.26.11.51
Abstract
Access to international scientometric databases has become restricted for Russian organisations, and national tools for research assessment have since been developed. In this context, the question of the transparency and reproducibility of journal-selection rules matters a great deal. The aim of this article is to audit the methodology used to construct the international component of the Unified State Register of Scholarly Publication Channels (USRSPC), together with the results of its application to a corpus of international publication channels. We assess the methodology’s internal consistency, the reproducibility of the resulting decisions, and the interpretability of the final journal ranking. The empirical analysis utilises the normalisation of files submitted by the Russian Centre for Scientific Information (RCSI) for review by the divisions of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the merging of duplicate records across subject categories, and the comparison of the 2026 USRSPC recommendations with the international component of the 2023 Whitelist. The findings show that the methodology combines, within a single final ranking, indicators of a journal’s scientific visibility, technical governance, institutional affiliation, geographic profile, and legal and political grounds. Treating these distinct dimensions as one category makes the ranking difficult to interpret and the resulting ranking decisions hard to reproduce. On this basis, we propose revisions to the scoring rules and, more broadly, to the design of the national list of scholarly publication channels.
About the Authors
Denis V. Kosyakov
Scientific Electronic Library LLC (eLIBRARY.RU)
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Head of the Department for Research and Advanced Technologies, Scientific Electronic Library eLIBRARY.RU; Researcher at the Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology Laboratory, Institute of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Geophysics, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Deputy Director for IT and Infrastructure, Novosibirsk State Regional Scientific Library
Dmitry M. Kochetkov
Scientific Electronic Library LLC (eLIBRARY.RU)
Institute for the Study of Science, Russian Academy of Sciences
Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Cand. Sci. (Econ.), Leading Researcher, Institute for the Study of Science, Russian Academy of Sciences; Doctoral Candidate at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies, Leiden University; Deputy General Director for Innovations in Scholarly Communication, Scientific Electronic Library eLIBRARY. RU
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For citations:
Kosyakov D.V., Kochetkov D.M. The international component of the Unified State Register of Scholarly Publication Channels: new questions and unresolved issues. Science Editor and Publisher. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.24069/sep.26.11.51
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