Anastasia Kuznetsova – the finalist of the competition of student works

Russian Public Opinion Research Center (RPORC) reported the results of the 10th annual competition of student works for 2017-2018 study year. This year's competition was devoted to the topic "SOCIOLOGY IN DIGITAL AND DIGITAL IN SOCIOLOGY".

Anastasia Kuznetsova became one of the finalists, a fourth-year student of «Sociology and Social Informatics» and a participant of the «Machine Learning and Social Computing Research Group». She presented her work "Webometric and Scientometrical Analysis of Russian Universities. The case of Northwestern Universities" surpervised byIlya Musabirov.

Anastasia shared her impressions with us.

- How did you find out about the competition and why did you decide to take part in it?

I learned about the contest from the mailing of our study office and later on, my scientific supervisor advised me to go for it. Since there was not much time left, we decided to try our luck with my course work.

- What was the topic of the work, and what is you problematics?

It is devoted to studying the strategies of Russian universities in the North-West region with the help of bibliometric and webometric indicators. Firstly, I looked at the number of publications and citation indexes of universities in the Web of Science and RSCI and compared numbers of universities. Then I analyzed the references of universities in the media and conducted a thematic analysis of the context of mentions. I got very interesting results. For example, there were universities that are often mentioned in the topic of corruption, and some in the business or science. One of the main conclusions is that regional universities direct their activity not so much to the international audience but they prefer to publish in Russian journals and by that develop their region. For example, NARFU was mentioned in the topic of Arctic development.

- What will you advise future HSE contest participants?

I would advise to go for it, just send everything you have got: your coursework, essays and so on. There are good chances to win/ Moreover participating helps to understand your knowledge, how "competitive" your works can be.  There are also grants for further research, and internships in RPORC. It is still, probably, one of the classic sociological competitions, in which you can see what other sociologists do outside HSE SPb.

                                                                                                                                                   Anton Kalinin