An Analysis of the Factors with Influence on Scientometric Indicators of Researchers from Pedagogical Universities of Ukraine

Abstract

The article is devoted to a scientometric study of pedagogical universities of Ukraine, involving an analysis of the influence of external and internal factors on the scientometric indicators of researchers from this category of universities, which data were extracted from the scientometric Scopus database. The authors selected seventeen universities forming the population of Ukrainian pedagogical universities which profiles are presented in this database. The following variables were used as external factors: the number of years since the university founding, the number of doctors and candidates of sciences, the population of the city where the university is located. The characteristics of the indexed scientific publications were chosen as the internal factors of influence: the number of authors of each article included in the h-index (one author, 2 to 5 authors, more than 5 authors); type of access to the article (open or closed); “age” of the article; article funding (available or absent); quartile of the journal in which the article is published. All the involved computations were made by the authors in the statistical package SPSS. To identify the impact of external factors on the scientometric indicators of the pedagogical universities, the authors calculated pair correlation coefficients of factor variables with Hirsch index. The impact of internal factors was determined by a series of single-factor analyses of variance, to identify their impact on citation rates of the articles included in the nuclei of h-indexes of universities. The calculated Spearman correlation coefficients between the h-index and the factor variables suggest that there is no significant correlation between the external factors and Hirsch index. That is, none of these external factors affect the scientometric indicators of the pedagogical universities. A series of single-factor analyses of variance showed that the formation of the core h-index of the pedagogical universities was significantly influenced by the internal factors “availability of funding for a particular publication”, “journal’s quartile” and “article’s age”. But an impact of the factors “number of the article’s authors” and “open access to the article” on the formation of the core h-index of the pedagogical universities was not found.