“Map of Russian science”: pro et contra. “Map of Russian Science”: a resonant or resonant project? Identifier in the map of Russian science

May 21, 2012 by the Minister of Education and Science Russian Federation Dmitry Livanov is appointed. In my first public speaking he voices the intention of the Ministry of Education and Science (MES RF) to conduct a comprehensive audit of the research and development sector, including institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, state scientific organizations and higher education institutions educational establishments. This statement can be called the birth of the “Map” Russian science“Unfortunately, due to the events surrounding the reform of the Russian Academy of Sciences, this project somehow got lost and, in our opinion, did not receive due attention from the IT community. We offer you a short retrospective: the project’s path from concept to implementation.

The aimless path turns blue before me,
A long path, dug by streams,
And then - darkness; and hidden in this darkness,
The arbiter of fate soars.

Alexander Blok, October 1899

Part 1: competition

The “Map of Russian Science” project (http://mapofscience.ru/) was officially announced in December 2012. On the eve of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, a competition was held to carry out research work on the topic “Formation of a system for assessing and monitoring the results of scientific research activities organizations and scientists for regular assessment of the state of the field of science.” The initial (maximum price) of the contract is 100 million rubles. Funding for the project was provided within the framework of the federal target program “Research and development in priority areas of development of the scientific and technological complex of Russia for 2007-2013” ​​(Competition for 2012, Activity 2.1, Stage 11, Lot 1).

Part 5: reasons for failure

As follows from the official position of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation and numerous reviews from the expert scientific community, the “Map of Science” turned out to be unsatisfactory. We will not discuss whether it corresponds to the goals of the completed government contract due to the lack of information about it. Another thing is important - how could such a situation be avoided? In our opinion, the key point in this story is that all the data on which this public information system was built is not open.

And here we would like to touch on the very pressing problem of open data in science. They simply don't exist. But if they were open, perhaps there would be no need for such a government order. The Science Map could be implemented by any professional developer interested in open data and science. Moreover, with appropriate demand from the state and the scientific community, there would be several such “maps”.

Let's look at the list of expected Russian sources for the "Science Map":

1. articles in Russian and foreign journals (NEB);
2. Russian and foreign patents (FIPS);
3. grants (FGBNU Scientific Research Institute RINCCE, RFBR, RGNF);
4. reports on research and development (CITS);
5. dissertations and abstracts (CITS);
6. book publishing (Russian Book Chamber);
7. information about scientific organizations and their departments (including universities and their faculties).

The vast majority of the above sources were formed due to state budget and it is not clear why this data is not public.

Part 6: how to fix the situation?

In May 2012, the Minister of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Dmitry Livanov, announced the intention of the Ministry of Education and Science (MES RF) to conduct a comprehensive audit of the research and development sector, including RAS institutes, state scientific organizations and higher education institutions. This statement can be called the birth "Maps of Russian Science". This project was officially announced in December 2012. On the eve of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation a competition was held to carry out research on the topic “Formation of a system for assessing and monitoring the results of research activities of organizations and scientists for regular assessment of the state of the field of science”. The initial (maximum price) of the contract is 100 million rubles. Funding for the project was provided within the framework of the federal target program “Research and development in priority areas of development of the scientific and technological complex of Russia for 2007-2013” ​​(Competition for 2012, Activity 2.1, Stage 11, Lot 1). A private consulting company won the competition "PricewaterhouseCoopers Russia B.V."- PwC.

By the end of 2013 the project "Map of Russian Science" received paid access to two main databases - the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) and Web of Science (WoS). Incomplete access to the WoS database (its part related to Russian scientists) cost the budget 40 million rubles. A (however incomplete) database was also added on leading Russian scientists regarding their monographs, as well as information on participation in R&D and grants. Mirrors of the project are also posted at www.scimap.alt-lan.com and www.kartanauki.rf It was assumed that the majority of Russian grant givers will switch to using "Maps of Russian Science" as the main source of information about publications of authors and grant recipient teams.

Add your fingers!

By 2016, a data array on foreign patents issued to Russian organizations was added to the project; information on patents for inventions, utility models and industrial designs of the Federal State Budgetary Institution « Federal Institute industrial property"; as well as information on monographs, textbooks for universities, textbooks for universities and collections scientific works from the Federal State Budgetary Institution "Russian Book Chamber". As a result, in "Map of Russian Science" information is presented for the period from 2007 to 2016, with subsequent necessary updating by the researchers themselves through manual data entry and requests to change information to technical support.

After confirmation of registration and user verification, information will appear in the “My Card” section that you can edit and supplement.
If the list of publications immediately turns out to be incomplete, then you can search through the system for missing publications and, if they are successfully found, put a mark of authorship.

Despite the fact that until the end of 2016, the “Map of Russian Science” project actually never left the beta testing stage, that is, it functioned with systemic shortcomings, officials of the Ministry of Education and Science and the Grant Council of the President of the Russian Federation (for state support of young Russian scientists and state support for leading scientific schools Russian Federation) treated this latest product of the domestic cargo cult as a full-fledged database. This is evidenced by an announcement posted on the website of the Federal State Budgetary Institution Research Institute RINCCE:

On participation in the competition for the right to receive grants from the President of the Russian Federation for 2017-2018.
To participate in the competition for the right to receive grants from the President of the Russian Federation for 2017-2018. for state support for young scientists, which will be announced at the end of August 2016, you will need to indicate:
<...>Individual number of a scientist in the Map of Russian Science (to receive it you must register on the website https://mapofscience.ru).

The scribe caught up suddenly, but was visible from afar!

On January 31, 2017, the Science Council under the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation published a statement on the website from the first meeting in 2017, in which the Minister of Education and Science Olga Vasilyeva also took part. According to this statement:

<...>During the competition, the organizers received project-related scientometric parameters from the so-called “Map of Russian Science”. The Council considers that during the four years of its existence this instrument has not achieved any satisfactory quality. A significant part of the information presented by the “Map of Russian Science” is erroneous and cannot be used in any adequate way. This created significant difficulties in summing up the results of the competition in question.
The Council calls on the Ministry of Education and Science not to use the “Map of Russian Science” for any purposes in the future. Instead, the Council proposes to use a list of generally accepted databases in various fields.

At the beginning of February 2017, without any official statements, the site and its mirrors disappeared from the Internet and are no longer accessible. At the same time, the further use of purchased databases and data entered by users themselves remains unclear.

As an alternative "Map of Russian Science" Vice-Rector of Moscow state university them. M.V. Lomonosov, academician Alexey Khokhlov, in an interview with the newspaper "Search" dated 02/10/2017, suggested using the system "TRUE" or , which “used at Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov and is now being implemented in pilot mode in ten institutes subordinate to FANO". No comments needed...

Is it a pity "monkey labor" those university teachers and research institute employees who entered information about themselves into the database "cards"? No, not at all - in order to realize on my own skin all the rottenness of the Putinoid system, “Vata grantees must suffer!” And the more they suffer, the more joyfully they will exclaim at the sight of corrupt officials stuffed into trash cans - "zaputintsev"!

PERSONAL IDENTIFIERS OF SCIENTISTS

ResearcherID is your free, publicly accessible interactive space for creating an individual ResearcherID number and personal profile, identifier (ID). Each author is assigned a unique identification number (ID), which later makes it easy to find the published works of a particular author, in particular in the Web of Science database. Your ResearcherID profile may contain information about your institutional affiliations, research areas, and a list of publications. ResearcherID service from Thomson Reuters.

• Instructions for registering with ResearcherID(Thomson Reuters video in Russian)
• Guide to working with ResearcherID

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID of ORCID company).

ORCID is a register of scientists' unique identifiers (IDs) and a way to associate research activities with these identifiers. Scientist identifiers are used to confirm authorship scientific works in SCOPUS and Web of Science. ORCID is unique due to its independence from scientific disciplines and national boundaries, as well as its interaction with other identification systems. ORCID is a non-profit project whose goal is to assign each author of a scientific article his own personal code. the main task identification code is to eliminate discrepancies in the names of the author.

The similarity of common first and last names both in one country and in different ones creates confusion in identifying the authors of scientific articles, especially in large databases such as Scopus. Even for our RSCI database, indexing authors with common and therefore similar first and last names faces significant difficulties, primarily for the authors themselves. The same situation is observed with all namesakes in all countries.

The new identification system ORCID ID (read in Russian as “orkid”) assigns each scientist his own unique number (ID ORCID), similar to a barcode in a store. It is a 16-digit numeric code. The letters from the spelling of the first and last name are replaced with numbers, which immediately solves all problems: pronunciation and translation into other languages, the identification of the author and his connection with published articles are automated. Using this code, a scientist is easily identified by scientific organizations and communities, publishing houses, and foundations.

ORCID ID is a kind of business card that not only makes the owner recognizable, but also allows you to communicate with colleagues from all over the world. The ORCID database contains the following data about the author: first name, last name in different ways of writing them; name of the organization in which the author works; list of published articles; grants of the author himself, as well as those in which his participation is recorded.

The value of the ORCID ID code is to free the scientist from the need for routine work of filling out various forms when publishing articles. It is enough to indicate your ORCID ID code and personal information from your personal account will be automatically transferred to the forms.

To register ORCID ID you must:

You need to register on the official ORCID ID website. After this, you enter information about your publications. You must answer all questions on the survey. After filling out all the fields of the questionnaire, the author is assigned his own ID code, and from that moment on, he can use the ORCID system. When filling out your profile in Personal account You can regulate your circle of communication with people yourself, making it public, limited or only personal at your discretion. Registration with an ORCID ID is free. To obtain information about authors, large publishers such as CrossRef, Elsevier, IEEE, ImpactStory, Thomson Reuters, Wiley and others cooperate with the ORCID system.

• Instructions for registering with ORCID
• ORCID Registration
• Instructions for working with ORCID

Scopus AuthorID.

Scopus- one of the world's largest scientometric and information-analytical IT platforms, located at http://www.scopus.com. Such resources are designed to facilitate the work of a scientist associated with the search for new incoming information. As a rule, they are additionally equipped with powerful information and analytical tools.

How to find an account (scientist profile) in Scopus? To carry out comparative analysis scientific activity in scientometric databases (or IT platforms), each author is assigned his own personal identifier (ID). This information makes it easy to identify the scientist and find his account.

A scientist's profile in Scopus contains basic information about him: his full name (and various spellings), last place of work, email address, bibliographic description of the scientist's articles (which are included in Scopus), as well as scientometric indicators such as the H-index and the number of citations his articles (all data according to Scopus). In order to view an author's account in Scopus, you need to know the unique ID number - the scientist's Scopus identifier.

How to find a scientist's personal ID in Scopus?

To do this, type http://www.scopus.com, click on “ Author Preview» and search by full name or place of work (you can also search by ORCID identifier). If your organization does not subscribe to Scopus (which is a paid database), you will only see the first 20 search results for your query. Authors will be ordered by number of articles in Scopus. In other words, if you are looking for an author with a common last name and a small number of articles in Scopus, then most likely you will not be able to see the result of your query in the free version, i.e. it may be outside the first 20 available answers. In this case, it is recommended to simply complicate the search query, i.e. combine full name, place of work, or at least indicate the country in which the scientist works. After you have found the author, you need to click on his name (they are designed as hyperlinks) and you will be taken to his account. Here the scientist’s personal ID number is written next to “ Author ID».

Scopus creates an account (profile) for each author automatically. This leads to several important conclusions. First of all, you don't need to create your Scopus profile. If you have at least one article in a journal indexed by Scopus, then this has already been done for you. Let us remember that some Russian magazines also indexed by Scopus. In other words, an article in Russian can also be included in this database. Secondly, it’s still worth looking at your Scopus account and “working out the mistakes,” since authors are identified automatically. Identification errors occur quite often. In order to adjust your account (scientist profile) in Scopus, you can use the following guide:

Over the past two weeks, the Russian scientific community has actively discussed the advantages and disadvantages of the “Map of Russian Science”. However, there was almost no talk about the merits. We asked the scientists who participated in testing the Map to give their opinion about this product.

Olga Moskaleva,
member of the working group formed by the Ministry of Education and Science to resolve methodological issues of the project:

The information system “Map of Russian Science” (www.mapofscience.ru), launched into trial operation on November 12, 2013, caused a large number of negative responses, mainly due to the lack of official information about the project from the Ministry of Education and Science (see, for example, -).

Last week, almost simultaneously, statements appeared on this matter from the ONR Council and from the Commission for Public Monitoring of the Progress and Results of Reforms in the Field of Science. They begin, it seems, with a list of what is bad in the “Map of Science”, what is wrong there in terms of publications, the number of employees in institutes, their positions, etc. Recommendations based on these comments are given to the exact opposite. ONR encourages “research workers to register on the KRN website in order to take an active part in testing the project and in developing proposals for its improvement.” The commission advises “to refrain from contacting the Map of Russian Science system to make any changes there.”

So what should researchers do in such a situation if they find themselves in a situation of directly opposite instructions? As noted in the blogs, scientists are an independent people and will decide for themselves what to do. Then why and for whom are these applications accepted? Where should I put a comma in relation to the Map of Science - “execution cannot be pardoned”?

The resulting excitement was largely provoked by statements from the Ministry of Education and Science that the “Map” is almost ready and is about to be used to evaluate scientific organizations. Meanwhile, at the very beginning of this project, the “Map” was positioned not at all as an assessment tool, but rather as a tool to help scientists themselves, reducing the time spent filling out grant applications and further reports on them. It was assumed that thanks to this system it would be easier to find and select experts in various fields of knowledge, including for holding grant competitions, forming dissertation councils, etc.

What is the history of the issue and what is actually in the “Map of Russian Science” now?

The creation of this project was first announced in the summer of 2012, shortly after the appointment of Dmitry Livanov as minister. At first, nothing but a general idea was voiced, and one could assume that the ministry was going to purchase ready-made analytical systems from Elsevier or Thomson Reuters. This is primarily a line of SciVal tools that perform a very complex analysis of publications presented in the Scopus database based on co-citation analysis. It was created by Elsevier and is widely used around the world to measure the scientific productivity of organizations, countries and regions. A completely different approach (using standardized citation metrics to compare different areas of knowledge and publications from different years) is implemented in InCites, developed by Thomson Reuters. It uses the Web of Science (WoS) database.

Brief descriptions of these tools and their capabilities can be found on or on the websites of the manufacturing companies. SciVal now has already constructed maps of science both for Russia as a whole and for quite a large number of Russian universities And scientific institutes RAS and RAMS. InCites also has many well-developed data sets for individual Russian organizations and regularly updates data for Russia as a whole.

Of course, it is difficult to draw conclusions about the state of science in Russia based on WoS or Scopus data, since most of the scientific publications of Russian scientists are not indexed in these databases, especially in the social and humanitarian fields. However, the Russian Science Citation Index, where the humanities are fairly fully represented, is less suitable for assessing publications by natural scientists.

The thought arises of bringing Russian publications and publications in international journals into one database and analyzing them together, but this is a very difficult task. In addition, to assess scientific activity, information only about publications in scientific journals clearly not enough - there are books, patents, speeches at conferences, grants, etc. This is exactly the ambitious goal that was set by the ministry - put all this data into one information system and conduct a joint analysis, while simultaneously building services for filing applications, reports and selecting experts .

After consultations of the Ministry of Education and Science with representatives of scientific organizations and universities that have Information Systems support for research work, a technical specification for the creation of a “Map of Russian Science” was formulated and a competition was announced for a contract worth 90 million rubles, which was won by the consulting company PricewaterhouseCoopers.

In March 2013, the main details of the concept, as well as some results of the discussion on a specially created discussion platform, were presented at a meeting of the working group. At the meeting, a presentation of the PricewaterhouseCoopers project took place, after which members of the working group and members of expert groups in the fields of science were given the opportunity to access a prototype of the “Science Maps” working interface to express comments and suggestions. In June, the second stage of testing the “Map of Science” began, already with partially downloaded data from WoS and RSCI.

Currently, trial operation of the industrial version of the “Map of Russian Science” has begun, in which each scientist can obtain individual registration data and check and correct data on their publications, grants, and patents.

And here, against the backdrop of tension associated with the reorganization of the academies of sciences, all the events described at the very beginning began.

What exactly causes such a sharply negative attitude of the majority towards an unfinished product? The main complaints are as follows:

• Discrepancy between information about the number of publications of a scientist in WoS or RSCI with what is visible in the “Map of Science”, as well as incorrect “linking” of publications to scientists
• Incorrect information about organizations in general - number of employees, number of academicians, doctors, etc.
• The appearance of non-core scientific areas in information about institutions.

The comparison of Maps of Science with WoS and Scopus, often made on blogs, is fundamentally incorrect, since this project is not a citation index, and Google Scholar does not search by organization.

All these mistakes are completely inevitable and easily explained. The “Map of Science” is loaded with information from WoS, selected based on indication of affiliation with Russia and Russian organizations, and not by the names of scientists. Therefore, to begin with, each scientist checking his data in WoS and in the “Map of Science” needs to remember or check what affiliation indicated in articles missing from the Map of Science.

Most likely it will turn out that a foreign organization is indicated or there is no affiliation at all. Such publications could not be included in the downloaded array of publications in principle. If publications from WoS are attributed to another scientist or the scientist has “multiplied” into several different profiles, then it would be good to ask yourself the question: “What have I personally done to ensure that all my publications in WoS are collected in one profile and not confused with publications of namesakes?” ? After all, for this purpose, the ReseracherlD author registration system has long been created, which greatly helps to avoid such errors in the database.

However, to date, only 11,472 authors from Russia are registered in ResearcherlD, with a total number of scientists of more than 300 thousand (and in the “Map” even more than 600 thousand are indicated, but this includes students, graduate students and foreign co-authors). For comparison: in Italy there are 11,245 registered scientists, in Germany - 11,733, in the UK - more than 20 thousand, and in China - more than 36 thousand.

As for the incorrect attribution of articles to organizations, trying to find publications of an organization in WoS often turns out to be an almost impossible task due to excessive creative approach both to indicate affiliation, and due to the abundance of name options on English language. This is further aggravated by constant reorganizations, mergers and acquisitions, which make it difficult to determine which organization a particular publication may belong to.

Now WoS has created a fairly large number of combined organization profiles (Organization-Enhanced), which merge all the names of the organization into one record. Only FIAN, offended by 1 article on vegetable growing, has 72 in its combined profile different names, and there is no guarantee that this is a complete list. The Kurchatov Institute does not have such a combined profile at all, and St. Petersburg State Medical University named after. Pavlova, who does not have a subscription to Web of Science, was completely included in the profile of the Institute of Physiology named after. Pavlova RAS...

A completely similar situation with the data in the RSCI: in the Science Index - author system, intended for the same thing in relation to the RSCI as ResearcherlD in relation to Web of Science, today 180 thousand scientists are registered, but most of them are actively engaged in checking their publications and citations in 2013 alone. In a similar system for organizations, 380 organizations are registered, and automatic linking of publications to scientists and organizations, even without an aggravating factor incorrect translation or transliteration is also not always possible and requires verification by organizations.

Regarding the discrepancy between the data from the “Map of Science” and the number of publications in the RSCI, there is another factor that practically no one takes into account - data from Scopus is also loaded into the RSCI, but for the “Map of Science” only publications in Russian scientific journals were presented.

Data on positions, titles and affiliation to a specific organization in the Science Map is taken exclusively from the profiles of authors registered in the Science Index system. Registration in this system is carried out on the basis of the existing RSCI user registration. So if a scientist began using the RSCI in 2003 and indicated his position at that time and, when filling out additional information when receiving a SPIN code, did not update the data on the changed degrees, titles and positions, then today’s corresponding member, according to available information, “Map of Science” may well be considered an associate professor and candidate of science.

A selective acquaintance with the data of the “Map of Science” shows that the information presented in it for organizations that verify the composition of the organization’s profile in the Web of Science and are registered in the Science Index - organization system coincides to a fairly good extent, and for organizations that do not have a profile in Organization-enhanced Web of Science, there is a fairly large number of errors. In principle, these errors cannot be completely corrected by either the developers or the ministry; this requires the participation of scientists and representatives of organizations themselves.

None of the critics paid attention to much more significant points - the lack of joint analysis of data from the RSCI and Web of Science (which is why all this work was started), as well as complete uncertainty about the future fate of this project. It is not clear how and on what basis the data will be updated, and with what frequency. Will regular intervention by scientists be needed to verify the data? Or could this be organized ideally by synchronizing information in the profiles of Science Index and ResearcherlD or ORCID authors, fields for which are provided when registering a user in the Science Map?

What has been done technically works, graphs are drawn, available data within the limits of the capabilities implemented to date are analyzed, and even in this state, the functions of services and a single repository of data on publications, patents, grants, etc. will be very useful. Provided the data is reconciled and regularly updated, the system can be a universal data provider for various reports, but the capabilities for analytical functions are still clearly insufficient.

So what should we do now with the “Map of Science” - correct it or ignore it? Which of the recommendations should you follow - ONR or RasKoma? Existing data errors are inevitable, they must be corrected, and cannot be done without the participation of scientists and organizations. However, all this makes sense only if there is a clear answer to questions about further updating the data and further refining the analytical capabilities of the Science Map.

Andrey Tsyganov, member of the ONR:

In my opinion, the list of main complaints about the “Map of Russian Science” project speaks specifically about the success of this project at the present stage. Indeed, in this project you can find:

• various information about the number of publications and citations of a scientist in WoS, RSCI and the “Map of Science”;
• recording the Russian and translated versions of articles in the scientist’s personal card;
• incorrect information about organizations as a whole, for example, the number and composition of employees;
• a list of all, including non-core, scientific areas in information about institutes, etc., etc.

All this is a consequence of the fact that developers set themselves the goal of automatically collecting information and placing all collected data in one place. They, not being experts, do not take responsibility for correcting, processing and interpreting information received officially from three databases: RSCI, Web of Science and, as planned, Scopus. The fact that the developers treat every bit of information so carefully and simply collect everything in one place is the main achievement of this project at the present time.

The main question is what exactly the community of scientists trusts, relatively speaking, “officials” to do and what it does not trust them to do, i.e., what scientists should do only themselves, not trusting anyone else.

If we say that “officials” must independently correct information about our publications, about our citations, this means that “officials” have the right to do this, without relying either on the opinion of the scientists themselves, or on the opinion of institutions, or on the opinion of experts. Should “officials” be given such a right?

For example, if we demand from “officials” to remove duplicates, i.e. we give the right to “officials” to decide for themselves which version of the article, Russian and English, should be on the site, then we trust the “official” to decide for himself which publication is important, and which is not important, without taking into account the opinions of both the author of the publication and representatives of the institute where the work was performed.
If we demand that “extra” authors be removed from the list of authors of the institute’s publications, this means that we are giving “officials,” and not official representatives of the institutes, the right to decide for themselves who worked, who was invited to work temporarily, and who did not work at the institute at all. But then don’t blame me if the “official” instantly extends this right to the future and decides for himself who will work in this institute and who will not.

Likewise, if we do not want “officials” to have the right to tell institutes what scientific areas to pursue, then we cannot give them the right to decide what scientific areas the institute has been involved in over the past five years. Let them automatically enter all the directions that were indicated in the publications of authors from this institute, in alphabetical order and nothing more! Only representatives of the institute, and not “officials” or anonymous experts, should even have the right to prioritize these areas, and not alphabetically.

So the main question for the “Map of Science” is not about “curve” data, but about who will process, update and interpret this data. In my opinion, “officials” should not be given extra rights. Processing, analyzing and interpreting open data on publications is too dangerous a tool to voluntarily hand over to non-specialists.

And the point here is not in the “Map of Science”, well, instead they will “evaluate” us according to the Web of Science, according to the RSCI, according to Scopus, or according to all professional databases combined. The point is not in the data, but in the rules for processing and evaluating information from publications and, most importantly, in justifying the legitimacy of using certain assessments in various fields of knowledge.

Therefore, the community of scientists, without being distracted by trifles, must first of all develop strict, detailed, justified not only by references to the great past and understandable to the whole society recommendations on the methodology, processing and interpretation of data on publications in various fields of knowledge, before others do it . There is no longer time to fight windmills; the time has come to answer the same eternal question: who has the right to what, and how will they have to pay for these rights?

Alexey Ivanov, member of the ONR:

My main complaint is not about the technical shortcomings of the Science Map, of which there are a huge number at the moment, but about a more fundamental thing: the question is who should have the right and opportunity to correct the initial data. It is absolutely rightly noted that only the institutions themselves and the scientists themselves can do this. In fact, for the first time the term “Map of Science” was heard in one of the orders of the Society of Scientific Workers (SSR) to the then newly appointed Minister Livanov. This order from the ONR noted that such a map can only be built from below, and in order to encourage scientists to fill in data for themselves, it was proposed to announce a competition for personal scholarships for scientists, issued automatically when a certain threshold value is exceeded, which was not known a priori, but it was estimated at 5-7 publications over three years, taking into account that about 10 thousand people were encouraged (http://onr-russia.ru/content/grants-scholarships-3,072,012). In this case, a “win-win” situation arose. The scientists were presented with a carrot, and in return the Ministry of Education and Science would receive a verified, albeit perhaps not completely complete, database of publications with an exact link to the individual. Unfortunately, the ministry took a different path. It began to make a “Science Map” on top. In the end, we came to where we started - the “Science Map” can only be filled out from the bottom. However, scientists no longer expect any carrots, but they immediately and irrevocably believe that they will beat them with a whip.

In this situation, I personally find myself in a situation of distinct cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, I have always said that reforms must begin with an assessment of the real state of affairs, and the “Map of Science” is a step in this direction. Accordingly, as a member of the ONR Council, I share the idea that the data in the “Map of Science” needs to be brought into line with reality, and no one except the scientists themselves can do this. On the other hand, the reform is already in full swing and life experience shows that the authorities do not care about the real state of affairs. The main thing for them is to maintain some formality for the external public. Do you have a map? Eat. Did the experts discuss it? We discussed it. Did scientists make corrections? They brought it in. And what is the quality of the “Map of Science” itself is the tenth matter. I therefore fully understand the Commission's recommendation that we have nothing to do with Map of Science until it is clear how it is intended to be used.

Any author whose publications are indexed in the Scopus database is assigned unique identification number (ID). In other words, Scopus creates a profile for each author automatically. The Author ID system was created by Elsevier in order to solve the problem of linking authors to publications, which arises from confusion with the coincidence of first and last names.

Therefore, there is no need to create your profile yourself. If you have at least one article in a journal indexed by Scopus, then this has already been done for you. And if you wish, you can go to your profile, at least to find out your ID number and the Hirsch index number (h-index) in the Scopus database. You can do this in one of the following ways:

First way. Search by article.

Step 1. Go to the tab Document search . Select search field Article title and enter the title of the article (note: if the title of the article has parentheses, it is better to replace them with spaces).

Step 2. Search.

Step 3. Select the desired article and go to the page containing its full description: imprint, authors, their affiliations, abstract, etc.

Step 4. Click on your last name, which will take you to your personal profile, where you indicate: personal ID number, h-index, areas of research, number of citations with links to documents, profile visualization, list of publications that the system automatically identified under your last name and initials, etc.

Step 1. Go to the tab Author search . Enter your last name (Last name), initials (Initials) or first name (First name) and, if desired, affiliation into the search fields.

Step 2. If your surname is common and you have many namesakes, you can specify the Subject Areas for a more precise search (note that the research area is determined by the journals in which your articles are published).

Step 3. Start the search by clicking the button Search.

Step 4. If you have only one article indexed in the Scopus database, then it is impossible to go directly to the author’s profile from the author’s last name. IN in this case you should select a team Show Profile Matches with One Document(Show profiles with one document), then hyperlink 1 Document go to the full entry of the article and go through your last name to your personal profile (similar to step 4 in the first search method).

We remind you that the automatic creation of an author’s profile does not always occur correctly, so the author’s profile must be edited. If there are several accounts with different spellings of your name, you can combine them into one profile.