Lesson 28. RSCI and the Nucleus of РИНЦ (RINTs)
In September 2014 Thomson Reuters Corporation (today Clarivate Analytics) and Scientific Electronic Library (SEL) concluded a contract on connecting the most influential Russian journals integrated into РИНЦ to Web of Science platform as a separate database Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI). This was done after the patterns of Chinese and Latin American citation indexes.
Figure 1. List of RSCI sources
Presence of a Journal in RSCI does not mean that the journal is indexed in WoS, but a number of journals are actually included into Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) or in other Web of Science indexes.
RSCI is a paid Database. In certain periods of time it may be accessible in a test mode for UrFU users. At the same time the data on these journals is always available in РИНЦ. The use of RSCI in the world is illustrated by the data placed in Clarivate Analytics: https://clarivate.ru/products/web-of-science-rsci.
Figure 2. The levels of content in SEL eLIBRARY
1. The Nucleus of РИНЦ includes all the publications in the journals currently indexed in Web of Science Core Collection, Scopus and RSCI. Apart from it, the nucleus will also comprise the best monographs and proceeding papers of the most authoritative scientific conferences selected by strict expertise. The Nucleus of РИНЦ is recommended for evaluating the most qualitative content of Russian scholarly publications.
2. РИНЦ. After removing predatory publications the Database will include only those published in a peer-reviewed academic sources as well as non-journal publications agreed upon the standards of publishing and scientific ethics. РИНЦ is recommended to analyze publication activity in all the academic categories including those where the national research level is inferior to the world’s one.
3. Scientific Electronic Library (SEL) eLIBRARY. It can additionally contain various sources related with scholarly activity but not being precisely academic, among them abstracts, popular science, informational and socio-political magazines as well as not peer-reviewed sources. These sources do not take part in statistical evaluation of academic activity in РИНЦ.
Figure 3. The main projects and initiatives of Scientific Electronic Library eLIBRARY, Association of Scientific Editors and Publishers (АНРИ), Volunteer Community Network “Dissernet”
In 2017 retraction of articles was introduced in SEL (here you can see examples of retracted articles), whereas the Retracted Articles Databases (RA DB) proper is in open access on the АНРИ site. It includes more than 3,000 descriptions of publications by the end of May 2020 (see Figure 4). The new version of RA DB was created by АНРИ and Nauka Publisher and provides automotive uploading of the data on retracted articles from SEL as well as by a complainant — a journal publisher.
Figure 4. The home page of the Retracted Articles Database
So, what is retraction? It is the action by which a published paper is removed from the academic journal by an official complaint. A retraction may be initiated by the editors of a journal, or by the authors of the papers. The most frequent causes of retractions are:
— plagiarism in the publication;— duplication of an article in several sources;
— falsification (for example, fraud of experimental data);
— serious errors in articles (for example, incorrect interpretation of the results) that challenges its academic significance.
As the top Russian journals are included into both Russian Science Citation Index and the nucleus of РИНЦ, so a researcher should focus just on these journals.
1. Isklyucheniye zhurnalov iz RINTs, retraktsiya statey I otkrytyye retsenzii: voprosy i otvety / SEL eLIBRARY. – URL: https://elibrary.ru/retraction_faq.asp (accessed: 22.05.2020).
2. Reglament bibliographicheskoi bazy dannykh RUSSIAN SCIENCE CITATION INDEX (by 09 October, 2018) / SEL eLIBRARY. – URL: https://elibrary.ru/projects/rsci/reglament_RSCI.pdf (accessed: 22.05.2020).