As you know, on July 13, an online signing ceremony was held between the Agency for Quality Assurance in Education and one of the world’s leading companies Clarivate Analytics. According to the agreement, access to the Web of Science scientometric database will be created for the first time for local higher educational institutions of Azerbaijan, as well as research institutes.
Our scientists, in their statements to “The Azerbaijan Muallimi” newspaper, highly appreciated the agreement concluded with the prestigious scientometric company. We share their thoughts with our readers.
“This is a great contribution to the scientific community”
Elchin Suleymanov, Vice-Rector for Research, Baku Engineering University
– The contract between the Agency for Quality Assurance in Education and Clarivate Analytics is a more elaborate and useful option than the contract signed with the Ministry of Education in 2015, and it is supported by the Ministry of Education and Science. It should be noted that almost 80 percent of world science is made up of scientific research, journal and conference materials indexed by Clarivate Analytics and the Scopus database, and this accounts for 20-25 percent of publications issued in the world. In other words, these databases contain credible, authoritative, high-quality research with few publications but high scientific weight is unequivocally accepted by the scientific community. These databases simultaneously measure and analyze the performance of scientists across countries and institutions. And today’s academic community consider it to be quite prestigious. I note that until the 2000s, the number of publications issued in these databases in the country was very small, even less than in neighboring countries. Since 2015, we have become the leader in the South Caucasus, and the number of publications on these bases is increasing every year. I hope that the next contract will increase scientific productivity a little more. This will have a positive impact on the competitive environment among universities. In parallel with this, another organization (Nina Ranking) measures the productivity of both research institutes and universities using three databases – Scopus, Web of Science and Google Chocalare. It includes about 20,000 scientists, as well as higher education institutions and research institutes, which Clarivate Analytics will currently vote on.
After the announcement of this rating, a competitive environment began to form among scientists. Today everyone сan monitor his productivity and dynamics, the X-index. At the same time, certain changes related to the legislation on the Higher Attestation Commission are also in this direction when conferring an academic title and degree. That is, it should be considered as a complex. A high-quality publication, a positive impact on the ranking of the university, the use of international grants recognized by our scientists, I would say, the creation of certain conditions – all this should be considered as a complex.
We must make our research available to the general public. We must do the research that the world demands. Azerbaijani scientists have opportunities and scientific potential for this. It’s just that in order to publish good research in good journals, you first need to have access to these databases and be able to use them. That is, if a scientist writes an article without using the most reputable journals in these databases, he cannot publish it in serious journals. Because reviewers, first of all, check if there are references from published articles in authoritative journals in the field. 20 higher education institutions joined the previous agreement. And now, regardless of the form of ownership, the unification of all universities and research institutes will allow a wider audience to use these databases and scientometrics. This is a great contribution to the scientific community, and I thank the Minister of Science and Education for his hard work in this direction, as well as the leadership of the Agency for Quality Assurance in Education, as a scientist who always uses these databases and scientometrics. I think it will be useful and we will see the result in the coming years. Because we did not wait long for the result of the first contract. That is, scientific productivity increased after one or two years. Some universities introduced a system of differentiated pay, which stimulated publication. Some universities offered prizes for each published article. In other words, the formation of a mechanism to support the publication of universities in these databases, I think, will help build an even more efficient ecosystem.
A very important step in the integration of Azerbaijani science into world science
Afsun Sujayev, Executive Director of the Institute of Chemistry of Additives of the Ministry of Science and Education, Doctor of Chemical Sciences
– This agreement, signed by the Ministry of Science and Education, can be assessed as a very important step towards the integration of Azerbaijani science into world science. You know that in the former Soviet Union, a part of which our country was for many years, in science, as in other areas, there was a “closed regime”, so there was no access to the world’s leading scientific databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus and the prestigious scientific journals archived in these databases. At that time, our scientists published their scientific papers at best in Soviet Union journals … they thought that if an article was published, for example, in the “Journal of Organic Chemistry – ZhorKh” of Russia, it was considered prestigious. However, besides a few of these journals, most of them failed to enter the academic bases we mentioned above. Therefore, articles published in Soviet times are not cited by world scientists today. The logical result of this was that even after gaining independence, Azerbaijan took last position not only among the Commonwealth of Independent States, but also among the republics of the South Caucasus in terms of scientific and publication activity. Only after signing a cooperation agreement between the Ministry of Education and Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS) in 2015 with Clarivate Analytics (Thomson Reuters Company) in 2016, our research and higher education institutions gave access to the world’s leading scientometric database like Web of Science. This significantly increased the scientific productivity of Azerbaijani scientists and researchers, improved the quantitative and qualitative indicators of scientific research, and in a short time Azerbaijan surpassed both Georgia and Armenia in terms of publication activity; many of our scientists have already entered the ranking of world scientists in terms of the number of articles in prestigious journals and the number of references to their work.
However, due to the fact that the agreement between ANAS and Clarivate Analytics has recently ended, the access of our research institutes and representatives of our academic science to this database was again impossible, which again caused serious difficulties in our activities. But one of these days, for the first time, private and public higher education institutions in Azerbaijan, as well as all research institutes, will provide access to the world’s largest scientific database like Scopus, Elsevier and Web of Science. The agreements reached with Clarivate Analytics companies, which will create accessibility, can help solve problems and bring Azerbaijan to the top of the rating list not only in the South Caucasus, but also in the leading countries of the world thanks to its publishing activity.
It is no secret that publications indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases constitute the most important part of scientific research in the world. Since the 60s and 70s of the last century, references of scientific research in world science are calculated scientifically, and these indicators are considered as indicators of the development of science in each country. Imagine, at the end of each year, the final annual report on the citation counting system of scientific publications is given in the Nature journal, which is the third in the world in terms of impact factor (IF = 64.8). The latest report states that although there are about 120 million scientific articles published worldwide, half of them are cited and the remaining half do not have an impact factor in regular journals, and some of them are even published in such journals. Research papers that are taken seriously and cited at least 10 times make up only 1-2 percent of the total number of publications in the world. Most of these publications are journals indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases. So this fact alone gives grounds to speak about the global significance of both bases. From this point of view, new agreements aimed at accelerating the integration of Azerbaijani science into world science will significantly increase the access of our scientists and scientific specialists engaged in real scientific activity to foreign journals included in such prestigious databases as Web of Science and Scopus . To be more specific, the benefits of cooperation with reputable international bases can be summarized as follows:
– Firstly, this will affect the further improvement of our country’s performance in the field of science and innovation in various international rankings. Everyone knows that the scientific activity of every scientist in the world is evaluated on the basis of scientific criteria. Among these criteria, the main parameters are the publication of articles in prestigious journals, the general reference to them and the h-index. Unfortunately, there are many scientists and researchers in our country who do not even understand its essence, let alone accept these criteria. They are not interested in creating academic profile pages not only in Web of Science and Scopus, but also in Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Mendeley.com and others. Those who share their thoughts consider the requirement of the Higher Attestation Commission under the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan to be an obstacle to the entry of young people into science. However, in any developed or developing country, a young professional who has received not only a PhD, but even a master’s degree has an article published in more than 10 prestigious journals and dozens of links to these articles.
It is one thing that publication in a prestigious foreign journal is not only a confirmation of the scientific knowledge of the author, but also recognition of the scientific institution where he works, the academy and, most importantly, the science of his country, a reference to his scientific work is also a reference in the world to the country which he represents. Thus, the new contracts will improve the profile of research institutions and researchers in these two bases, increase the accessibility of their scientific activities and increase cooperation with other scientific institutions and scientists around the world. At present, I would say that one of the serious problems observed in the process of integrating Azerbaijani science into world science is the lack of consideration of relevance and modernity in most research topics, conducting research on developed topics, as well as the fact that certain research institutes are engaged in repetitive research. Today, when evaluating the topics of our scientific research in international search engines, the unpleasant picture is being revealed, the topic is often not relevant, isn’t interesting for world scientists, or is a developed topic. Therefore, it is not possible to publish the results obtained on such topics in prestigious foreign journals, or the published articles are not cited. Also, the facts of plagiarism in defended dissertations are exponentially increasing. In one case, the number of dissertations to which the HAC refused to award the corresponding academic degree over the past year amounted to about 450, and most of them are associated with plagiarism facts, it is necessary to realize the seriousness of the problem.
Our researcher, who has already entered the international databases, will see that multidisciplinary research is being carried out in all scientific areas in the leading scientific centers of the world. Because in recent years, the most important scientific innovations – discoveries and inventions – are obtained precisely at the intersection of interdisciplinary sciences. If we look at the scientific papers that have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Natural Science over the past 10 years, we see that most of them contain solutions to the joint problems of several scientific directions. It should also be taken into account that there are certain fundamental and applied issues in science, the approach of one scientific direction in their solution does not justify itself, and satisfactory results are not achieved for many years. There is a need for an integrated scientific approach to such issues, therefore, as we noted above, the most successful scientific results of recent years are reflected in research where sciences meet with an interdisciplinary approach. From this point of view, our research institutes and scientists will move away from repetitive work, establish collaborative relationships with research centers on current and contemporary topics, and be able to contribute more to world science through international collaborative research. Of course, somewhere between 15-20 thousand scientists and researchers across the country, including 100 thousand students, will achieve this using various Web of Science and Scopus database tools, using modern scientific resources.
Oruj Mustafayev