Information support of Russian universities in core research areas

Introduction: integration of scientific literature into education process, information support of teaching and research with scholarly information directly impacts the level of education and science and thus determine national and international university ranking and reputation. National system of information support for science and education has been established and successfully developed in Russia since 2006. The system provides access to subscribed scholarly resources. At the current stage of development of the national-wide information support, the key role belongs to the state-funded projects. The authors outline the problem of quantitative assessment of the level of information support in fields of science in respect to different classificators. Materials and Methods: the study draws on bibliometric methods, keyword searches and analytical services and functionality of Web of Science Core Collection database. Materials and instruments include lists of resources subscribed within the projects of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation and Russian Foundation for Basic Research; sets of articles downloaded as a result of keyword searches; journal title lists of the WoS CC and Scopus and mappings of the WoS Categories and fields of science in classifications of OECD and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. Results: we defined and calculated quantitative values of the parameter of information support for five priority areas of development of the Russian scientific and technological complex and six fields of science of the first level of the OECD classification and six branches of science used in the assessment of higher education institutions performed by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. Discussion and Conclusions: we compared results of the information support analysis for three subscription years 2015, 2016 and 2017. We found that the level of information support in the given priority areas and branches of science exceeded the pre-crisis level. Relatively low level of information support in two branches of science, namely Agricultural sciences and Humanities, is revealed. The list of additional resources in two above-mentioned branches of science is proposed. The methodology developed in this work enables mapping of online scholarly resources and research areas within different classificators. The latter provides tools for qualitative analysis and development of the map of information support in any particular university.