Research in non-metropolitan universitiesas a new stage of science development in Russia

Abstract

The tremendous social and political changes that culminated in the Soviet Union's dissolution had a great impact on the Russian science community. Due to the Russian transformation to a market economy a new model of R&D emerged on the basis of the higher education system (R&D in universities). This paper is part of a project, the main goals of which were to analyse the impact of competitive funding on R&D in provincial universities, the distribution of funding by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research, and the level of cross-sectoral and international collaboration. This paper gives a descriptive overview of R&D conducted at the 380 provincial universities, looking at 9,800 applications, 1,950 research projects, 19,981 individuals, and more than 29,600 publications for the period 1996–2001. Our data demonstrated a positive tendency in demographic statistics in the provinces. A map of intra-national collaboration taking place in 1995–2002 in provincial universities situated in different economic regions was designed. Our data show a strong collaboration within the regions, which is an important factor of sustainability. Publication output grew by a factor two or two-and half in six years. The share in output on mathematics was the highest at about 45%, physics and chemistry had equal shares of about 20% each. Researchers from the Ural and Povolzh'e regions were more active in knowledge dissemination than their colleagues from the other nine economic-geographic regions. Bibliometric analysis of more than 1,450 international collaborative publications for 1999‘2001 demonstrated a strong shift in collaboration partners from Former East Block and former USSR countries to Western Europe, USA and Japan. Among the regions, Povolzh'e, Ural, Volgo-Vyatsky and Central Chernozem'e demonstrated a stronger tendency to collaborate. This collaboration depends heavily on financial support from foreign countries.