RANKING OF BELARUSIAN ECONOMISTS: SCIENTOMETRIC APPROACH

Rating of the economic research market participants  is an important scientific task that provides an information basis for various consumers of scientific products, including policymakers in the spere of science management. The market includes authors, scientific journals, economic universities, and rankings of all actors are interdependent. In the Russian Federation the analysis of this market is the significant area of research due development in the last decade. Not is the same in Belarus: the first attempts to compile ratings are being made. The article is devoted to the design of a rating of Belarusian economists based on the scientometric approach, and the analysis of the success factors for the strategies to promote personal brand. The principles of scientometric management serve as the methodological basis of research. The ranking was designed on the improved methodology of Balatsky and Ekimova via including of indicators for the RSCI core in order to account the quality of publications and citations. The information base consists of the electronic RSCI system with significant adjustments that made it possible to “clean up” the indicators.

The obtained results allowed us to determine the main factors of successful strategies, i.e.: regular publication activity from the beginning of an academic career; co-authorship; a balanced publication portfolio with obligatory submission of the papers to prestigious journals; co-working within a scientific school in the narrow sense of the word to increase citation. With correct processing, the RSCI data can serve as primary information on the academic activity of researchers, but the scientometric approach can only be used as one of the rating tools, and it is unlawful to mechanically use it as a criterion for assessing the effectiveness of a scientist. Further research can be aimed to improve the presented rating by including publications in foreign journals in the analysis, refining the sample according to the RSCI database in the direction of selecting high-quality publications and excluding less valuable types, and conducting surveys among representatives of the community of economists themselves about their assessment of the scientific significance of their colleagues.

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