Seeker of doctor of sciences (D. Sc.): publication activities

The article analyzes publication activities of seekers of D. Sc. at Russian Universities. At present academic research are becoming a priority activity for higher education. Due to that candidates and seekers of D. Sc. at the university deserve particular attention as important assets of this university in the future. Academics present their research to the society by means of publishing articles, monographs, and conference articles. Therefore publishing activities of the researcher are very important in evaluating his performance results. At the same time we see growing requirements from the HAC to the number of publications made by seekers of academic degrees. This has caused the need to evaluate publication activities of D. Sc. seekers. We used data provided by dissertation councils in the electronic form of annual reports. Publication activity was also evaluated on the basis of the data provided by electronic resources eLIBRARY.RU and Web of Science. In order to evaluate "post-defense" publishing activities we compared D. Sc. seekers employed by higher education institutions and research institutions who defended their doctoral theses in 2010. The article presents quantitative analysis of D. Sc. seekers publishing activities before and after defending the thesis. Research on "pre-defense" publication activities shows that age does not determine the number of publications by D. Sc. seeker. Publication activities on the topic of the thesis begin when decision on its preparation is made. Preparing the thesis usually takes 6-8 years, as a result irrespective of their age D. Sc. seekers have approximately the same number of publications required for defense procedure by the time of the defense. In 2014 average number of publications by the time of the defense was 53, 19 of which were publications in periodicals recommended by HAC. The numbers are very different for different branches of science (for example total number of publications for sociology is 42 and for geology and mineralogy - 72).The number of further "post-defense" publishing activities for D. Sc. reaches 90% of those who defended the thesis. 50% of seekers employed at higher educational institutions and 70% of those employed at academies of sciences have active publishing life with about 304 publications per year during "post-defense" period. Analysis of publication activities of seekers according to the quotation base of Web of Science demonstrates high level of activity for natural sciences both before and after the defense of D. Sc. thesis. We plan a total research of publication activities on all D. Sc. seekers during several years. Presented information can be useful for those involved in top academic staff attestation system and D. Sc. seekers. This is the first ever conducted research on publication activities of Russian D. Sc. seekers. Obtained results allow for evaluating the current state and science development perspectives on the level of preparing D. Sc.. theses and "post-defense" publication activities of those successfully defending their theses.