Obituary

The well-known scholar on scientometrics Dr. Irina V. Marshakova died suddenly on March 10, 2019, in Moscow. She was born on June 23, 1941. Dr. Marshakova received a Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics from the State Institute on Geodesy and Cartography. Dr. Marshakova belonged to the first generation of Soviet specialists engaged in the citation analysis research. At that time, the term “scientometrics” was not well-known by the international community.

Irina Marshakova was a graduate student from the All Soviet Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI) of Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1970–1973. Working as a graduate student, Irina Marshakova developed a method of co-citation analysis on lasers’ documents indexed in SCI. This work was done independently from Dr. Henry Small at the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, Philadelphia, PA, USA). The article “Relationship between documents based on citations indexed by SCI” was published in the “Scientific and Technical Information” (1973, ser.2., N6, pp. 3–8) journal in 1973. This article was highly regarded by Dr. E. Garfield and attracted great attention by the scientometrics community.

Dr. Marshakova defended her dissertation on “Algorithmic classifications of dynamic documentary dataset” (Aлгopитмичecкиe клaccификaции динaмичecкиx дoкyмeнтaльныx мaccивoв инфopмaции) under the supervision of outstanding scholar Prof. Ylius Schreider in VINITI in 1975. She was awarded a Ph.D. degree in Information Science by State Qualification Committee in 1976.

Irina Marshakova defended her second degree (Дoктop филocoфcкиx нayк) Doctor of Philosophy, and her research topic was “Methods of Quantitative Analysis of Scientific Knowledge” at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1993. She worked as a leading specialist in the institute until the last days of her life.

Continuing to perform research on scientometrics Dr. Marshakova spent few years teaching at the University of Silezia in Katowice (Uniwersytet Śląski w Katowicach) and at the Kazimierz Wielki University (Uniwersytet Kazimierza Wielkiego w Bydgoszczy) in 1995–2000.

Dr. Marshakova was awarded by few grants from the Russian Foundation on Humanities and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research during 2001–2013.

Last years of her life, her research was focused on bibliometric performance of social sciences and on development of normalized indicator for journals’ evaluations.

Irina Marshakova was an active member of the International Society for Informetrics and Scientometrics—ISSI since its first conference in Berlin in 1993. She also participated in many COLLNET conferences. Dr. Marshakova enjoyed the well-deserved authority of many foreign and Russian colleagues. Throughout her life, we felt her presence and participation in the life of the national scientometrics and information science community, and we deeply mourn her sudden departure.

Valentina Markusova

VINITI of RAS, Moscow, Russia

Wolfgang Glänzel

KU Leuven, Belgium