Improving tax journal’s international visibility: Findings from literature review and faculty survey

Russian universities are trying to promote their scientific journals in international citation bases and are making attempts to publish their journals in English. The aim of the study is to examine how can this strategy help to increase the international visibility of Russian tax research and tax journals. The literature review was conducted to investigate the role of scientific journal in faculty’s and university’s ranking. Non-random sampling survey was conducted with on-line questionnaire in September 2021 to examine Russian faculty and academics foreign language publications with connection to their foreign language skills. Based on the literature review we indicated three groups of ranking affecting factors: economic factors (author geographic affiliation, size of university or department, presence of strong business schools, academic training outside), co-authorship (international collaboration, number, gender and quality of co-authors) and individual characteristics (journal’s specialization and quality, faculty’s PHD-affiliation and language skills). We found that 95% of the survey participants have publications in foreign language. The significant relationship between the number of publications and the level of language proficiency exists only for participants who have more than 30 foreign language publications. The 89% of respondents who indicated that they never use a foreign language in their professional activities also have foreign language publications, and 15% of them have publications in journals Web of Science and Scopus (Q1 and Q2). Our findings indicated that the lack of language proficiency is not the main handicap for progression of the Russian research and journals visibility in international level. The main challenge is that we need to direct the research to an audience who might not at all be interested or knowledgeable about the national research context. Based on the obtained results, the recommendations were offered to potential contributors of articles in English and editorial boards.