The quality of publishing performance of university researchers in the regions in the context of citation locality

The author discusses the findings of the comparative study of RSCI metrics associated with the Hirsch index, and the data on the citations locality for the  authors affiliated with leading Ryazan region universities. The purpose of the study is to assess the quality of publication performance of the regional academic community. The methods of comparative analysis, systematization, bibliometric analysis  and mathematical processing of data in MS Excel spreadsheets were applied. 

The RSCI served as the study empirical base. The group of 52 authors was selected through the three-stage process; the most intensively cited and published Ryazan scientists in the field of socio-economic science and the humanities were identified. The findings evidence that the quality of publication performance of scientists in the regions can be assessed more objectively using local citation data. The comparison of these data with the RSCI metrics enables to identify potentially abnormal areas of unfair citation patterns. It was found that Hirsch index for journal articles alone is the most representative for the academic integrity. Based on the study of the structure of citations of the lower ranking authors, the author reveals the indirect indicators of unfair citation. She introduces the scientometric indicator "citation locality index". Its use will be limited to assessing the quality of scientists' publication performance in regions. However, the conclusions on citation manipulation should be made based on expert review. The obtained data are visualized in  6 tables; besides, the complete data of the comparative analysis are accessible via the public domain on the Zenodo platform.

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