Russian Index of Science Citation: Overview and Review

Abstract

At the beginning of 2016 the new index was launched on the Web of Science platform — Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI). The database is free for all Web of Science subscribers except those from the former Soviet Union republics. This database includes publications from the 652 best Russian journals and is based on the data from Russian national citation index — Russian Index of Science Citation (RISC). Though RISC was launched in 2005 but there is not much information about it in English-language scholarly literature by now. The aim of this paper is to describe the history, actual structure and user possibilities of RISC. We also draw attention to the novel features of RISC which are crucial to bibliometrics and unavailable in international citation indices.