Good Intentions Gone Wrong: Russian Historical Scholarship and the Proliferation Effect

The beginning of the new millennium witnessed unprecedented changes for Russian journals, driven not by shifts in scholarship or publishing technology but by external factors. By far the most of important of these has been an overt initiative on the part of the Russian government to disincentivize low-impact publication and raise the general level, visibility, and competitiveness of Russian scholarship in the international arena. Given the critical importance that state policy has accorded to numerical/statistical measurement (naukometriia) in this area, journals and authors have found themselves forced to pay attention to their work in new ways, developing the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in what has become an increasingly scrutinized and quantified publishing environment. Although this essay focuses on publication in the historical field, the developments affecting history are similar to those affecting other disciplines. At issue is the unprecedented decision by the government to transform academic journals into the arbiters and regulators of the quality of national research. The shift began some 15 years ago, when the Supreme Commission for Accreditation (Vysshaia attestatsionnaia komissiia [VAK]) of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education determined that successfully defended dissertations could be announced only in a select list of journals—the so-called “VAK list”—that met a number of formal expectations established by the commission. Though the reform prompted some grumbling at first, most prospective authors—that is, advanced graduate students and scholars like myself studying or working in Russian academia—ultimately accepted the commission’s decision and adapted to the new development.