THE QUALITY OF SCIENCE IN ESTONIA, LATVIA, AND LITHUANIA AFTER THE FIRST DECADE OF INDEPENDENCE

Abstract

Introduction All three Baltic states--Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania--have made a significant effort to break away from the previous Soviet structure of science. For instance, the former division between the institutes of the Academy of Sciences without teaching obligations and universities has disappeared. Scientists receive funding for their research directly from the science funding agencies, rather than from their own institutions as an aftermath of bureaucratic decisions. Funding decisions are increasingly based on scholarship and academic merits that are established by a peer review process, beside personal relations and belonging to an old boy network (cf. Allik 1998). Clearly, the single most pressing problem for Baltic academia is the inadequate amount of money available for science. None of these countries come even close to the level that EU member countries on average spend on research and development (R&D). Only Estonia invests in R&D at the same level with those with the lowest R&D investments among the EU member countries such as Greece and Portugal (Key Figures, 2002). The situation is particularly demanding in Latvia where R&D intensity is one of the lowest in Europe. From the EU candidate countries only Romania and Cyprus have lower R&D percentage from the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The ten-year period since regaining independence is long enough to evaluate the quality of science and especially the dynamics of the quality in three Baltic states. Science administrators of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are often rather enthusiastic about the progress of research and scholarship in their own countries. Their main argument for these optimistic, sometimes uncritically optimistic appraisals is the existence of a few outstanding scholars or benevolent results of some international evaluations. All three Baltic states are similar in the respect of steps they took for an external evaluation of their science. In 1991, the Estonian Science Foundation applied to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Swedish Research Councils with a request to carry out a thorough evaluation of Estonian science. The Danish Research Council carried out a similar evaluation in Latvia in 1992, and the Research Council of Norway conducted an evaluation of Lithuanian research (Martinson 1999). In all three cases, the evaluations were relatively benevolent, partly due to the evaluators' surprise to find high competence and good research at least in some areas of science. At the same time, more rigorous bibliometric assessments of national sciences in general are very rare (see Tiits & Kaarli 2001 as an exception). Bibliometric indicators show that Estonian science in general is still less intensive than science in the rest of the world. For example, even the most advanced field of Estonian social sciences, psychology, is at least 7 times less effective than it is in Finland (Allik 1998). There are all reasons to expect that the intensity and quality of research is not much better in Latvia and Lithuania. The main goal of this essay is to provide an analysis of bibliometric indicators of the quality of science in three Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, during the last ten years. Bibliometric indicators The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), founded by Eugene Garfield more than 45 years ago, created the world's three largest databases of scientific information--Science Citation Index (SCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). Every year, more than a million new articles are added to this database. For example, in 2001 999,618 (SCI), 149,672 (SSCI), and 105,236 (AHCI) new entries were added to the three databases. In total, it is more than 1.25 million new articles per year. Currently, ISI and the citation indices are owned by the Thomson Corporation, a company that in 2001 had revenues of US $7. …