State Paternalism: from Science to Scientometrics

Abstract

The article presents the results of the study of public opinion in the context of science reforming. The adoption of the Law on the Russian Academy of Sciences has in fact liquidated academic freedoms and consolidated state interference into scientific life by simultaneously escalating the use of Scientometrics. Respondents' assessments of the use of Scientometric indicators and journal rankings indicate that most economists do not trust the Scientometric tools. Based on the results of a sociological survey of the community of economists in 2020, the article concludes that there is a "managerial failure" of the paternalistic state. An analysis of the Scientometric indicators used in Scopus is also presented, including three well-known metrics: CiteScore", SNIP, and SCImago (SJR). In addition to the description of the sample of journals and the scale of monitoring, the author presents the criterion of ranking the journals MWR and the algorithm of its definition in comparison with the SJR indicator in Scopus. The final part of the paper discusses the econometric model based on the hypothesis that there are links between the ranking of journals, obtained on the basis of a sociological survey of economists, and the estimates of the "usefulness" of the introduction of relevant Scientometric indicators by the same respondents. The calculations performed have confirmed the formulated hypothesis and allowed to quantitatively measure the impact of the respondents' attitude to Scientometric indicators on the value of private ratings reflecting the Scientific level of the journal, the public prestige of the journal and Interest in the journal publications.