Modeling Publication Activity of the Faculty and Managing Scientific Indicators of the University

Abstract

The article is devoted to the development of tools for analysis and forecasting of performance indicators of Russian universities that have a direct impact on the performance of the program «Digital Economy of the Russian Federation», as well as national projects. The proposed tools are based on mathematical modeling of the results of the publication activity of the University faculty, presented in the world's leading scientometric systems. For example, we consider one of the leading Russian universities (excluding branches). The publications of its employees in publications indexed in information-analytical systems of scientific citation Scopus and Web of Science from 2000 to 2018 were analyzed. All employees were divided into groups, depending on their publication activity, expressed in the form of the annual number of publications. When modeling the transition of employees from one group to another, depending on the number of their publications, the apparatus of Markov chains was used. The constructed model was used to predict possible scenarios of changes in the total number of publications of the organization in the databases of Scopus and Web of Science. The direct task of implementing several scenarios of increasing the number of publications was considered, as well as the inverse problem of finding a management solution to achieve a result in a timely manner. As a result, it was found that the most acceptable for this University scenario is the one in which a third of the faculty staff annually increases the number of publications by 1.5 units within two years. From a practical point of view, the presented results are useful for the University administration to assess the current state of the publication activity of the organization as a whole and its improvement in the near future. This will lead to an increase in the indicators of scientific activity of the University and strengthen its position in the world rankings. The use of the proposed tools will contribute to the solution of tasks to achieve the indicators of the program «Digital Economy of the Russian Federation», in particular, Russia's place in the ranking of GTCI, as well as the national projects «Education» and «Science».