Russian medical science in foreign journals: quantitative analysis of the publication flow

Introduction. In Russia in the 2010s, at the state level the tasks of improving the efficiency and quality of medical research and integration into the world science were set.

The purpose of our work is to study the trend in publication activity of Russian medical scientists in foreign journals in 2010–2020. The results are interesting in the context of assessing the fulfilment of the mentioned tasks.

Materials and methods. Research method — quantitative analysis of the metadata array of publications of Russian scientists in foreign scientific journals for 2010–2020. Data sources — Web of Science Core Collection (22,953 articles by Russian authors), Scopus (34,413), Medline (37,468). The combined data set is stratified by the level of scientific journals.

Results. Articles in foreign journals account for a smaller portion of the publications by Russian scientists in medicine, but this portion has been growing in recent years and exceeded 20% by 2020. The growth in the number of foreign articles was observed at all levels of the journal hierarchy, from reputable journals to weak and more questionable ones. In reputable journals, no noticeable drop in the number of articles by Russian scientists was observed in 2022 and 2023.

Research limitations. The study is limited by its data sources: only journals indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, and Medline were analyzed, excluding part of the global medical literature. Additionally, all articles with at least one author affiliated with a Russian institution were classified as Russian, which may not accurately reflect the origin of the research.

Conclusions. Russian authors began to publish their results more often in foreign journals, including leading ones. This indicates some progress in solving the mentioned problems of improving research performance. However, the growing number of Russian articles in questionable journals represents an adverse side effect of the evaluation of scientists by publications, which requires adjusting the previously used approaches to stimulating scientists to publish.

Compliance with ethical standards. The study does not require the submission of a biomedical ethics committee opinion or other documents.

Contribution of the authors:
Dyachenko E.L. — the concept and design of the study, writing a text, editing;
Agafonov Iu.G. — the collection and processing of the material, writing a text, editing;
Guba K.S. — the concept and design of the study, editing.
All authors are responsible for the integrity of all parts of the manuscript and approval of the manuscript final version.

Funding. The work was supported by the European University in St. Petersburg within the framework of the competition for prospective studies.

Conflict of interest. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Received: September 2, 2024 / Revised: April 17, 2025 / Accepted: December 17, 2025 / Published: March 4, 2026

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