The Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI) is Russia’s national bibliographic and citation database, developed since 2005 by the Scientific Electronic Library eLIBRARY.RU in partnership with the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). It indexes roughly 13 million publications by Russian authors and citation data drawn from more than 5,000 Russian-language journals, making it the primary bibliometric infrastructure used to track, evaluate, and report on research output produced within Russia. For research administrators and identifier specialists working outside Russia, RSCI is most relevant as a case study in how a national citation index is built, governed, and used for research assessment, and in how it relates to (and, since 2022, has diverged from) the international citation-index platforms it was briefly integrated with.
What RSCI Is, and How It Relates to eLIBRARY.RU and RISC
eLIBRARY.RU is a Russian-language scientific electronic library platform that has operated since the mid-1990s, aggregating full-text and bibliographic records for Russian scholarly journals, monographs, and conference proceedings. Beginning in 2005, eLIBRARY.RU built a citation-indexing layer on top of that content, originally referred to in the literature as the Russian Index of Science Citation (RISC). RISC computes citation counts and derived indicators (including journal- and author-level metrics) across the journals it covers, functioning as a domestic analogue to citation indexes such as the Science Citation Index.
In 2016, a curated subset of RISC content was launched as a distinct product called the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI), the result of cooperation between the Russian Academy of Sciences and Clarivate (then Clarivate Analytics), the operator of the Web of Science platform. Journal selection for RSCI combined bibliometric evaluation with expert review, and the initial release covered roughly 650 leading Russian journals — a smaller, quality-filtered subset of the much larger body of titles indexed in RISC on eLIBRARY.RU itself. By 2019 that curated list had grown to roughly 770 journals. In practice, “RSCI” and “RISC/eLIBRARY.RU” are often used loosely as synonyms, but they are technically two related layers: the full eLIBRARY.RU citation database, and the smaller, editorially selected subset that was made available through Web of Science.
Governance and Development
RSCI/RISC is developed and operated by eLIBRARY.RU, working in partnership with the Russian Academy of Sciences, which has been involved in the platform’s development and in the selection criteria applied to journals included in the curated RSCI list. This places governance of the index primarily within Russian scientific and academic institutions, distinct from internationally governed citation infrastructure such as Clarivate’s Web of Science Core Collection or Elsevier’s Scopus, which apply their own independent editorial selection processes (see, for the Web of Science case, the criteria discussed in CASRAI’s guide on why journals get delisted from Web of Science).
Coverage and Scope
As of the most recent published figures, RSCI/eLIBRARY.RU holds approximately 13 million publications by Russian authors, together with citation data drawn from more than 5,000 Russian journals. This coverage is concentrated in Russian-language scholarly output and journals published in Russia, in contrast to internationally oriented citation databases that prioritize English-language, internationally circulated journals. That difference in scope is the main reason RSCI exists as a separate national index rather than researchers relying solely on Scopus or Web of Science: a substantial share of Russian scholarly output, particularly in the humanities, social sciences, and some applied fields, is published in journals that international citation indexes do not cover.
RSCI on the Web of Science Platform, 2016–2022
From its 2016 launch until 2022, the curated RSCI journal subset was made accessible as a distinct citation index within the Web of Science platform, alongside indexes such as the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Sciences Citation Index. This gave the roughly 650–770 selected Russian journals a citation-tracking presence inside an internationally used discovery and assessment tool, and allowed their output to be searched and cited alongside non-Russian literature on the same platform.
That integration changed in 2022. Clarivate announced it would cease commercial operations in Russia, and RSCI was removed from the Web of Science platform in May 2022; new-journal evaluation for RSCI inclusion had already been suspended before the removal. The underlying RISC/RSCI database itself continued to operate independently on the eLIBRARY.RU platform, which is not dependent on Web of Science for its existence — eLIBRARY.RU predates the Web of Science integration and has continued its own indexing and citation-counting operations since. The practical effect of the 2022 change is that RSCI content is no longer discoverable or citation-linkable through Web of Science; it remains accessible directly via eLIBRARY.RU.
How RSCI Is Used
Within Russia, RSCI/eLIBRARY.RU functions in several institutional roles comparable to those Scopus, Web of Science, or national indexes play elsewhere:
- Dissertation and degree requirements. Russia’s Higher Attestation Commission (Vysshaya Attestatsionnaya Komissiya, VAK) maintains a “HAC List” of journals in which candidates for the Candidate of Sciences and Doctor of Sciences degrees must publish results from their dissertation research. Journals on the HAC List have, for more than two decades, been required to deposit issue metadata into RSCI/eLIBRARY.RU as part of that listing; a 2025 order from Russia’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education added a parallel registration requirement with a separate database, the Russian Scientific Journals (RSJ) platform.
- Research assessment and reporting. RSCI-derived indicators (publication counts, citation counts, and journal- or author-level metrics computed from them) are used by Russian universities, research institutes, and funding bodies as one input into institutional and individual research evaluation, in a manner broadly analogous to how institutions elsewhere use Journal Impact Factor or h-index figures drawn from Scopus or Web of Science.
- Author and institutional profiles. eLIBRARY.RU maintains author-level profile pages with publication and citation histories, functioning similarly in purpose (though not in governance or interoperability) to a Web of Science Researcher Profile or a Scopus Author ID.
RSCI Compared to Scopus, Web of Science, and OpenAlex
The core distinction is scope and governance, not methodology: all of these are citation-indexing systems that compute citation counts from a defined set of covered journals, but they differ in which journals they cover and who decides what’s included.
- Scope. Scopus and Web of Science apply internationally oriented selection criteria and skew toward English-language, internationally circulated journals; RSCI/eLIBRARY.RU is scoped to Russian scholarly output and Russian-language (or Russia-published) journals. OpenAlex, by contrast, aims for broad, open, non-selective coverage rather than curated inclusion.
- Governance. Scopus is operated by Elsevier; Web of Science by Clarivate; RSCI/RISC by eLIBRARY.RU in partnership with the Russian Academy of Sciences. None of these bodies’ selection or exclusion criteria are interchangeable — a journal’s presence in one index says nothing about its status in another. See CASRAI’s comparison of Scopus, Web of Science, and OpenAlex for how the two dominant international indexes differ from each other before adding a national index like RSCI into the comparison.
- International interoperability. Since the 2022 removal from the Web of Science platform, RSCI citation data is not cross-searchable with Web of Science holdings; a publication indexed only in RSCI will not appear in a Web of Science search, and vice versa for Web of Science content not separately indexed in RSCI/eLIBRARY.RU.
Practical Notes for Research Administrators
A few points matter specifically for research offices, librarians, and identifier specialists who encounter RSCI in a CV, grant application, or bibliometric report:
- An RSCI or eLIBRARY.RU citation count is not directly comparable to a Scopus or Web of Science citation count for the same author or publication — the underlying journal sets, and therefore the citing-publication pools, are different. Treat figures from each source as measuring different things, not as alternative measurements of the same thing.
- RSCI/eLIBRARY.RU is not currently part of the Web of Science platform, so it will not surface in a standard Web of Science search or citation report, regardless of how comprehensively a Russian author’s output is indexed on eLIBRARY.RU itself.
- When assessing a CV or publication list that cites “RSCI-indexed” journals, that designation reflects inclusion in the specific curated RSCI journal subset (not the full RISC/eLIBRARY.RU database), which is a meaningful but Russia-specific quality signal — comparable in kind, though not identical in criteria, to Web of Science Core Collection or Scopus inclusion elsewhere.
- For CRIS and research-information-management purposes, RSCI/eLIBRARY.RU records generally do not carry DOIs or link natively into ORCID records in the same automated way Crossref- or DataCite-registered content does; institutions working with Russian-affiliated researchers’ publication lists should expect more manual reconciliation of eLIBRARY.RU records against other identifier systems.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is RSCI the same thing as eLIBRARY.RU?
Not exactly. eLIBRARY.RU is the platform and the broader RISC citation database it hosts, covering a very large body of Russian scholarly literature. RSCI is a smaller, editorially curated subset of that content — originally around 650 journals in 2016, growing to roughly 770 by 2019 — selected for the version that was, until 2022, also made available through Web of Science. Both are developed and operated by eLIBRARY.RU.
Is RSCI recognized internationally the way Scopus or Web of Science are?
RSCI functions as Russia’s national citation index and is widely used within Russian research assessment, but it does not have the broad international institutional recognition that Scopus or Web of Science have, and since being removed from the Web of Science platform in May 2022 it is no longer cross-searchable with that platform’s holdings. International funders, journals, and institutions do not generally treat RSCI inclusion as equivalent to Scopus or Web of Science indexing.
Why was RSCI removed from Web of Science?
Clarivate announced it would cease commercial operations in Russia in 2022; as part of that wind-down, RSCI was removed from the Web of Science platform in May 2022, after new-journal evaluation for the index had already been suspended. The underlying RISC/RSCI database continues to operate independently on eLIBRARY.RU.
Does publishing in an RSCI-indexed journal satisfy Russia’s dissertation publication requirements?
RSCI/eLIBRARY.RU deposit has long been a requirement for journals on Russia’s Higher Attestation Commission (VAK) “HAC List,” which sets the journals in which Candidate of Sciences and Doctor of Sciences dissertation results must be published. As of a 2025 ministerial order, HAC List journals must also register with a separate database (the Russian Scientific Journals platform), alongside the existing RSCI/eLIBRARY.RU requirement — administrators advising researchers on this pathway should confirm current requirements directly with VAK, since these requirements have changed over time.
How many publications and journals does RSCI cover?
The RISC/eLIBRARY.RU database as a whole holds approximately 13 million publications by Russian authors, with citation data from more than 5,000 Russian journals. The more narrowly curated RSCI subset — the one formerly hosted on Web of Science — covered roughly 770 journals as of 2019, the most recent widely cited figure.
