PUBLICATION ACTIVITY AS A PRIORITY IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF RUSSIAN UNIVERSITIES
The list of published research papers is the hallmark of everyone involved in scientific and pedagogical activities in higher educational institutions. In 2012, V. Putin, the President of the Russian Federation, signed a decree entitled “On measures to implement state policy in the field of education and science”, which states that by 2020 at least five Russian universities will join the top 100 world university rankings (THE World University Rankings, QS World University Rankings, SJTU Academic Ranking of World Universities). The article examines the issues related to the increase in the publication activity of Russian universities, with special attention paid to universities participating in the 5-100 state program). It also identifies the main trends and consequences of the university rating race, and looks at the real situation in Russian higher education. The motivation and scientific relevance of the work is to demonstrate that today the priority of all universities in Russia is a primitive manipulation of publication activity rating, just as with their researcher’ citation indices. A formal-quantitative approach to the important issue of publication activity worsens the quality of education and research in educational institutions of the Russian Federation. The work concludes that the successful activity of Russian universities and their progress towards the international standards is possible only if the benchmarks are shifted from higher places in ranking tables to a qualitative improvement in the scientific and pedagogical activities.