UL achieves the greatest annual number of scientific publications to date

The collected data show that since 2017, the volume of publications and citations of UL researchers has been on the constant increase – from 646 publications in 2017 to 1000 publications in 2021. This is decidedly the best achievement of any Latvian scientific institution, including higher education institutions, and the trend is consistently upward. In the SCOPUS database, scientific publications are divided into four quality categories or quartiles. The first and second quartiles are the most scientifically valuable publications, last year, for UL these accounted for more than half of the total amount – 620. This is an indicator according to which UL is fast approaching the 400 best universities in the world.

"The strategic vision of the University of Latvia is to be a research university with a high international reputation. Our value is scientific achievements and their integration in studies, forming the basis of the international recognition and competitiveness of the UL. The SCOPUS database is only one of the indicators that confirm the excellence of UL researchers, but it is a key indicator whereby research institutions are evaluated on the international scale," UL Vice-Rector Valdis Segliņš comments on the achievement. "Our goal, certainly, is to advance and to constantly expand the range of scientific publications, encompassing the areas where the number of publications of the first and second quartile is not yet large. This, of course, requires time and adequate financial resources, especially for young researchers in the social sciences and humanities. Our goal is not the number of publications as such, but the scientific publications of high quality, reflecting major research and discoveries." According to the UL vice-rector, the indicators which help to measure achievement of the UL strategic goals includes the average citation rate of one publication in the SCOPUS database and the percentage of joint publications with foreign partners in the SCOPUS and Web of Science databases. "We are very pleased that the targeted and outstanding work of our researchers brings us closer to fulfilling our strategic goals," adds the UL vice-rector.

SCOPUS is Elsevier's bibliographic and citation information database of multidisciplinary scientific publications, containing records of more than 21 000 journals, 86 000 e-books and 6.8 million conference proceedings, as well as 27 million patents. SCOPUS also provides abstracts of articles and opportunity to download full texts of articles from publishers' full-text databases such as ScienceDirect, SAGE Journals and others.