Analysis of the Publication Activity of University Researchers

Today the competitiveness of the university is estimated by the results of what place it occupies in international rankings. The most famous ratings are “Times Higher Education World University Ranking” and “QS World University Ranking”. It is not so important in what rating your university participates; they all evaluate the publication activity of your researchers. This forces universities to evaluate the quality of publications of their scientists. It seems to be a simple task, but in fact, there are many risks of incorrect assessment. In order to avoid an incorrect assessment it is necessary to know these risks and to be able to avoid them. These risks can be classified as follows: errors that the scientometrical base allows (for example, Scopus); mistakes made by a university researcher (author of the publication); errors made by the analytical department. The errors of scientometrical databases include: lost citations of publications of university researchers; wrong identification of authors (incorrectly indicated affiliations or incorrectly indicated last names). The mistakes made by a university scientist include: the name of the university is incorrectly written in the publication; citation is incorrectly indicated in the publication; scientist each time differently writes his name. The errors made by the analytical department include: when analyzing publications, all the works of the author are taken into account (only those publications that are affiliated with the university should be taken into account); does not take into account the specific subject area of publications; year of publication is incorrectly taken into account; authors self-citations are not excluded.