Assessment of scientific cooperation between the scientists from Armenia and Russia within the Joint bilateral grant projects

Armenian-Russian scientific relations have a solid historical basis, developed both within the same state and on the level of independent states. After the collapse of the Soviet Union the Russian Federation and the Republic of Armenia have signed a number of agreements to regulate and enhance existing scientific relations. Starting from 2012 state-sponsored bilateral grant competitions were the next important step in deepening the existing scientific ties and building new cooperation. The article discusses Armenian-Russian bilateral grant projects organized jointly by the State Committee of Sciences of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Armenia and the Russian National Foundation for Humanities and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research under the Government of the Russian Federation. Within the framework of cooperation between these bodies on the contractual basis 5 grant projects have been organized so far. However, only 4 projects are discussed in this article as the last one has started very recently and it is too early to speak about the results. The study is based on the databases of Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science (WOS), eLibrary’s Russian Index of Scientific Citation (RINC) and Armenian Index of Scientific Citation (AINC) developed by the Center for Scientific Information Analysis and Monitoring. Publications of the participants of the grant projects indexed in WOS were considered from 2006 till 2015, RINC – 1991–2015 and AINC – 2007–2012 (the difference in timeframes is connected with the availability of the resources). The period of investigation captures 1991 to 2015, although in some cases it goes deep into 1981. For the implementation of this research such bibliometric indicators as author’s publication number, citation number, self citation number, average citation per item, H-index, impact factor of the journals were used. The participants of the grant projects were divided into two groups: the winners and the other participants. Bibliometric indicators, ages as well as scientific degrees of these two groups were compared. The influence of these bilateral grants projects on the overall Armenian-Russian scientific cooperation was also highlighted. Basing on our investigation we came to the conclusion that in some cases bibliometric indicators of the other participants’ group prevail over the winners’ group, while the results of the grants peer-review process not always correlate with the bibliometric indicators of the winning group.