A Convention Convenes: Comparative Law in Search of a Constitutional Ideal
On December 7, the VIII International Congress of Comparative Law "Comparative Law in Search of a Constitutional Ideal" was held at the Institute of Legislation and Comparative Law under the Government of the Russian Federation. During the congress, Kirill Molodyko, lead researcher at the HSE-Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development delivered a presentation on the topic “Ways to Develop Comparative Russian-Ukrainian Studies in the Field of Law”.
Kirill spoke about the successful completion of a half-year project for the release of a special issue of the Russian Law Journal dedicated to Ukrainian law; he detailed the preparation of the issue, and the insightful problems that preparation entailed. According to the speaker, a large number of materials from Ukrainian researchers that entered the competition in this special issue of the journal clearly showed that, despite the difficult general political situation, many Ukrainian legal scholars want to cooperate with Russian scientific publications.
Russian Law Journal holds the second place ranking among all Scopus editions of not only all post-Soviet countries, but throughout Eastern Europe also, reaching the border of the third and second quartiles overall, and has all the necessary qualities to break into the second quartile. At the same time, scientometric indicators should not be both underestimated or overestimated. According to Kirill, indexing journals in various databases cannot be considered as absolute proof of the high quality of the articles published in them. Many Russian researchers are obsessed with publications indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus databases, due to the requirements of their employers, which is a negative phenomenon rather than a positive one.
A number of very prestigious journals, both Russian and foreign, for a number of reasons do not show any particular desire to be indexed, and this has no effect on their scientific prestige. At the same time, some of the journals indexed in the lower quartiles do not have high scientific prestige. In this regard, according to Molodyko, the decisions of the management of the National Research University Higher School of Economics are correct: to abolish the obligation for employees to publish in the Web of Science and Scopus publications, while maintaining high rewards for publishing in foreign journals which place in the top two quartiles of the respective databases; and to make internal lists of prestigious journals, for publications which will be of increased importance in the process of professional certification for employees.
Open free access to all materials of the special issue of the journal is available here.