The ultimate publication activity of the Russian authors of the scientific journals

The paper deals with an approach to finding the ultimate number of papers Russian authors deliver to scientific journals. The approach is based on an assessment of the entire audience interested in publications in scientific journals, an assumption that each author personally pursues a research and writes a paper for the scientific journal, as well as an account for the co-authorship indicator, i.e. the involvement of colleagues into the research performed by the author. The research employs data by Rosstat, Higher School of Economics and Scientific Electronic Library to reveal all the authors interested in publication. This indicator is then multiplied by a value of co-authorship. The number of papers the authors publish per year is recommended to be taken as a random value, to be used later as a basis for building a probabilistic distribution of the ultimate number of papers among all authors. The distribution is built by the Monte Carlo method, and the analysis employs the apparatus of the probability theory and linear algebra. The obtained data and data from the Scientific electronic library have been exposed to comparative analysis. The work revealed that for the annual amount of more than one article the distribution of the number of papers received from the Russian audience can be approximated by a normal distribution, with all its parameters depending on maximum annual number of papers, scope of audience and co-authorship indicator. This gives the ultimate number of papers for any section (group of disciplines or a particular discipline). The article considers the examples of obtaining the distribution for the ultimate number of papers. The results can be used for correcting the research policy of an organization or an institute of higher education in the directions of activity being researched, and can serve as a guide to the necessary number of papers in various fields of science.