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Regular version of the site

International Colloquium on Scientometrics

The SELS staff and the Department of Sociology students have attended an international colloquium on scientometrics, which took place in Helsinki (Finland).

On the 27th of May, the Technical Research Centre of Finland (VTT) hosted an international colloquium on scientometrics in Helsinki. Daniel Alexandrov and Valeria Ivaniushina attended the colloquium as guest speakers; they were accompanied by Victor Karepin and Ekaterina Mehnetsova, first-year students of the Department of Sociology. The lecturer on programming and data analysis Ilya Musabirov also participated as a guest from Russia. Victor and Ekaterina can now share their impressions on this event:

"This was our first visit to an international scientific event. The colloquium was organized in Helsinki by the Finnish research centre VTT, and we will tell you about some interesting things that were happening there.

The event started in the morning at the upper floor of our hotel, and just before 9 am we took an elevator there, which we shared with an elderly gentleman. He spotted a workshop program in our hands, and told us that he was also attending the colloquium. As it turned out, that was Professor Tuomo Kassi from the University of Lappeenranta, and later he made sure that everyone would get his business card.

At the dinner, we were sitting at the same table with him and with Ismael Rafols. We discussed a lot of various things, from the weather to the supposedly sensitive topic of the Soviet-Finnish war of 1939. We were also talking about graduate programs in the University of Lappeenranta, and about the desire of the Catalan population to declare their sovereignty from Spain. Needless to say, Ismael is a son of Catalonia, and he sympathizes with the independence movement in that region.

Ismael was participating in a round table discussion, which was organized by the SELS at the beginning of the study year, so many students here should remember him. This time, he was talking about interdisciplinary research, and on ways to measure this interdisciplinary. We found this particularly interesting; possibly because of the connection of his research with networks and the analysis of social networks. Some examples of their use in science studies can be found on the research group website.

Tuomo Kassi was accompanied by his graduate student Samira Ranaei. She came to study in Lappeenranta from Iran. It’s quite likely that we may see her in August at our Summer school on the analysis of social networks. She was very interested in the elective course, "Principles of Programming for Sociologists”, which we hold at the HSE. Samira has recently begun studying the R programming language, and she is very impressed by the fact that, at the HSE, it is being taught from the first year.

One of the most interesting phenomena  we heard about at the symposium  was the so-called "security paradox”.

Prof. Alexandrov described it in his talk on the history of research collaboration between Western Europe and the former Soviet republics.

A “security paradox" is a situation when research which concerns the state defence capacity and for this reason, as one would think, should be classified for security reasons, would be nevertheless carried out by international teams and achieve success."