Introducing the Armenian Science Citation Index Platform: Overview and Development Trends

INTRODUCTION

Bibliometric tools are increasingly utilized to evaluate the research output of individual researchers, scientific organizations, institutions, grant projects, and more (Moral-Muñoz et al., 2020). Among these tools, traditional bibliometric databases such as Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus are recognized as the leading repositories of trusted scientific content worldwide. However, they face notable limitations, particularly regarding geographic and language coverage. These databases predominantly focus on research from the United States and Europe and favor publications in English (Mongeon and Paul-Hus, 2016). A major concern is the underrepresentation of national and domestic scientific journals, especially within the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). In response to criticisms about limited coverage, WoS has begun integrating regional and national indices, such as the Chinese Science Citation database, Korean Journal Database, Russian Science Citation Index, SciELO, and Arabic Citation Index, into its platform. Similarly, Scopus has initiated efforts to include more national and domestic journals.

Despite these efforts, these remain isolated initiatives, and significant gaps persist in the representation of national/domestic journals and publications in national languages. A recent study by Asubiaro et al. (2024) highlights this disparity, revealing that journals from Europe, Oceania, and North America are far more likely to be indexed in Scopus and WoS, while sub-Saharan Africa experiences the highest level of geographic underrepresentation.

For over half a century, the role of the English language as the modern lingua franca in science has been widely recognized (O’Neil, 2018; Montgomery, 2009). The consistent growth in English-language scientific publications (Kumar et al., 2016; Liu, 2017) has been accompanied by an increase in non-English language publications (UNESCO, 2021). This trend is particularly evident in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), where research often focuses on national issues and is published in local languages.

Nevertheless, the dominance of English remains largely unchanged. Publications in English continue to be prioritized for indexing in Scopus and WoS, while the SSH fields suffer from limited coverage (Asubiaro et al., 2024). At the same time, preserving locally relevant scientific research in SSH is vital, as it helps safeguard scholarship with regional or national dimensions and enriches the diversity of global academic discourse (El-Ouahi, 2023).

Simultaneously, there is a growing demand for the internationalization of national science. Bibliometric tools, which apply quantitative analysis to scientific publications, are increasingly employed to evaluate the performance, efficiency, and competitiveness of science systems at various levels: macro (regional, national), meso (institutional), and micro (individual) (Leydesdorff and Persson, 2010; Bornmann and Leydesdorff, 2014). These evaluations rely heavily on international scientific databases, further underscoring their significance.

In recent years, there has also been a notable proliferation of new journals worldwide. National journals are periodicals primarily published in the national languages of specific countries. Their publishers, editors, reviewers, authors, and readers typically originate from the same geographical region, with their content predominantly addressing topics of local interest. Despite their regional focus, national journals possess all the essential characteristics of scholarly communication and are suitable for bibliometric and scientometric research (Moed et al., 2021).

Recent studies emphasize the importance of recognizing national journals that are not indexed in WoS and Scopus, as many of these journals contain high-quality and valuable publications (Pölönen et al., 2020; Sasvári et al., 2019). Despite this, the majority of domestic journals remain absent from these databases, resulting in little to no international visibility (Solana and Liberatore, 2008). This lack of representation means that a significant portion of scientific knowledge remains unnoticed.

In Armenia, the situation reflects this global trend, with most research outputs produced in the country excluded from international visibility and evaluation. Out of nearly 123 scientific journals published in Armenia, only eight are indexed in WoS and/or Scopus. This exclusion has multiple consequences: on the one hand, it severely limits the ability to evaluate the scientific output published in Armenia; on the other, it diminishes the international visibility of Armenian science (Gzoyan et al., 2023).

To better illustrate the current situation in Armenia, it is worth noting that only 1,174 scientific articles published in local journals have ever been cited in WoS, a figure that falls far short of being satisfactory. Language also plays a significant role in this issue. The majority of journal articles published in Armenia are in Armenian, with relatively few articles published in other languages such as Russian, English, and others. This linguistic barrier significantly limits the potential readership and reaches of these publications. Moreover, the majority of the 1,174 articles that have received citations in WoS are written in foreign languages. Of these, only 286 publications in the Armenian language have been cited in WoS, further highlighting the challenges faced by Armenian researchers in achieving international visibility (Figure 1).

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The challenge of ensuring the visibility and evaluation of local scientific publications in Armenia has long been a persistent issue, limiting the recognition and global impact of Armenian research. To address this problem, the Armenian Science Citation Index (ASCI) was developed by the Center for Scientific Information Analysis and Monitoring (CSIAM) at the Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems, National Academy of Sciences (Gzoyan et al., 2017). This paper aims to explore how the ASCI platform can enhance the assessment, impact and visibility of local scientific publications in Armenia.

The article offers a comprehensive overview of the ASCI platform, detailing its development, current status, and coverage. The methodological approach involves an in-depth analysis of the platform's architecture, indexing processes, and evaluation mechanisms, emphasizing its effectiveness in addressing the needs of Armenian researchers and institutions. Furthermore, the paper examines future trends and potential enhancements to strengthen the platform's role in advancing Armenian science and improving its global presence.

METHODOLODY

In 1963, Eugene Garfield established the Science Citation Index (SCI) (Jin and Wang, 1999), marking the beginning of a new era in evaluating the impact of scientific papers and creating a foundation for bibliometric research. This pioneering index set a precedent for the development of other general, local, and regional science citation indices. While several successful local and regional indices have been established, many others remain at the conceptual stage.

The oldest non-English citation index developed outside the Western world is the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), created by the Documentation and Information Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the late 1980s (Jin and Wang, 1999). In 1991, it evolved into a research and development project co-sponsored by the National Scientific Foundation of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Initially, the CSCD was used in conjunction with the SCI to evaluate research performance. However, in February 2020, China's Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science and Technology issued guidelines discouraging the use of SCI for research evaluation (Qian et al., 2020).

One of the most successful regional citation indices is SciELO, initiated in Brazil in 1997 as a national project (Meneghini et al., 2006). Over time, it expanded to include other Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking countries. The development of SciELO is often considered a classic example of how a local initiative can grow into a regional platform. Initially focused on a single country, it gradually expanded to include 15 other countries and diversified its scope with new components, such as the SciELO Citation Index and SciELO Books (Packer et al., 2014). The platform’s founders ensured its continued growth by integrating it with the Web of Science (WoS), making SciELO a model for transitioning from a local to a regional citation index while also linking to WoS and developing new tools. It stands as an exemplary case for national indices aiming for similar development trajectories.

Another notable example is the Russian Index of Scientific Citation (RISC), launched in 2005 under the guidance of the Scientific Electronic Library, which won a competition announced by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation. Since 2016, the best journals from RISC have been included in WoS as a separate database, the Russian Science Citation Index (Moskaleva et al., 2018). Between 2014 and 2016, the Center for Scientific Information Analysis and Monitoring (CSIAM) conducted collaborative research with the Scientific Electronic Library as part of a bilateral Armenian-Russian state project, Analysis of the RA and RF Scientists’ Scientific Activity and Scientific Ties According to Citation Databases. This collaboration significantly influenced the development of the ASCI by helping to shape its framework.

In 2020, the Arabic Citation Index (ARCI) was launched as part of the Web of Science (WoS) platform. ARCI include scholarly research published in local journals from 22 Arab League countries where Arabic is an official language, including Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The criteria for inclusion in ARCI are aligned with those of the WoS Core Collection (Clarivate Analytics, 2019). The selection process is overseen by an editorial board consisting of members from Arab League countries who contribute subject expertise and regional insights. Journals are selected based on traditional scientific publishing standards and the scholarly norms of the Arab region, including peer review.

Another notable example is the Korea Citation Index (KCI), developed by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF). Its origins date to 1998, when a national system for evaluating scholarly journals was introduced. Building on the bibliographic data accumulated through this system, KCI was established in 2007 and became publicly available in 2008. The database indexes Korean scholarly journals and is linked to the Korea Researcher Information system, supporting both research evaluation and bibliometric analysis. By 2013, KCI covered more than 2,100 journals across major academic disciplines (Kim et al., 2013).

The Serbian Citation Index (SCIndeks) is an example of a national citation index developed in a country with a relatively small population compared to the aforementioned cases. Its development began in the 1990s, driven by the efforts of a group of enthusiasts and volunteers (Pajić, 2015). By the 2000s, the project had gained nationwide significance and received financial support from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Serbia. In 2005, SCIndeks was officially launched through a collaboration between the Center for Evaluation in Education and Science and the National Library of Serbia (Popović et al., 2011). Since 2008, SCIndeks has been legally recognized as a reliable source for evaluating scientific work, alongside WoS.

In 2014, public funding for SCIndeks was discontinued (Pajić, 2015), leading to several challenges. Journal coverage was significantly reduced, as publishers were required to pay for indexing─a condition that many were unwilling or unable to meet. Furthermore, the withdrawal of funding dealt a severe blow to the Open Science movement in Serbia (Pajić, 2015). These developments highlight the critical importance of sustained financial and institutional support in ensuring the effectiveness and inclusivity of national citation indices.

The primary goals of local and regional science citation indices are to enhance the visibility of local publications and journals─many of which are published in non-English languages-on an international level and to provide tools for evaluating the scientific output of local research communities at micro, meso, and macro levels. Importantly, these indices are designed to complement, rather than replace, international databases like Scopus and WoS, thereby offering a more comprehensive picture of scientific activity and productivity.

Similarly, ASCI aims to facilitate the comprehensive assessment of scientific potential in Armenia while increasing the visibility of Armenian publications on a global scale.

The analysis made in the current article is based on the data, collected from the ASCI. Data mining was done in two ways: the information automatically collected from the ASCI’s databases and presented on the frontend of the index and in its administrative panel; data acquisition from the databases of ASCI by development team. The data input into the ASCI is done either manually by entering the metadata of the articles or other document types into the corresponding lines of the Content Management System or automatically from Crossref via Application Programming Interface (API). After initial data input it goes through the processing phase, which includes data cleaning, identifying the authors and affiliations, handling the references etc. As a result, we have a trustworthy data massive which enables to conduct various types of analysis concerning the research activities in Armenia. The high level of data accuracy achieved through the scrupulous work done by indexing specialists of the CSIAM team and relatively small scale of the scientific field of Armenia. We have made a desk research on the various cases of national and regional science citation indices to present the background information which can be helpful for potential readers of this article in the term of grasping the broader picture on the issue. As the next step we have presented in details the ASCI, its structure, features and potential fields of use. The brief history of the ASCI’s development is also presented.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

Only a limited amount of research output of the Armenian researchers is presented in the journals indexed in the WoS and/or Scopus databases (after Armenia regained its independence in 1991 until now there are some 30.000 publications). This amounts to nearly 20-25% of research output produced in Armenia. Thus, the majority of scientific knowledge produced and disseminated in Armenia remained unnoticed by international scientific community. Furthermore, after the establishment of the Science Committee and the import of grant system in Armenia, the attitude towards the domestic journals has also changed and the need emerged to somehow evaluate and analyze their content. At the same time, to meet the requirements now posed to the scientists to publish in the journals indexed in the WoS and /or Scopus databases, some Armenian domestic journals are on the way to adhere to international requirements and try to be included in the mentioned databases. All these resulted in the necessity to create a national science citation index, which will address and tackle the mentioned issues.

Following the international trends and addressing the challenges of the evaluation of national science, CSIAM initiated the creation of the ASCI in 2012. The whole process, which lasted more than one decade, can be divided into four phases: studying of the international experience; formulation of the idea and outline of the ASCI; collecting the initial data which later laid into the basis of the ASCI; the development, testing and launching the ASCI.

The ASCI platform has a comprehensive repository of academic documents, encompassing approximately 26,600 publications and a staggering 381,000 citations. It encompasses 72 (out of 123) local scientific journals, which provide their full texts for indexing, giving the platform a distinct advantage. This unique feature facilitates the extraction of citation contexts in snippets, offering a capability unparalleled. There are currently no explicit requirements for a journal to be indexed in ASCI, except that its content must be available for indexing. At this stage the aim is to gather as much local journals as possible, while in the future the ASCI will have its core collection.

The platform is well structured, featuring over 30 fields of comprehensive bibliographic metadata for each record, facilitating bibliometric analyses. These fields encompass vital information such as Publisher Information, Funding Information, Research Area, Cited References, and Received Citations. Moreover, alongside essential metadata in English, the platform offers specific details written in Armenian. These include authors’ names, article titles, publication names, author keywords, abstracts, and addresses. Such multilingual support enhances the inclusivity and accessibility of the platform, catering to a diverse user base and fostering broader scholarly engagement.

The platform also compiles comprehensive trilingual directories of Armenian scientific institutions and authors, enabling accurate identification of relevant fields across publications. This functionality allows users to conduct searches in English while also retrieving results in which names are written in Armenian or Russian. A similar capability is available for other fields as well. For instance, when searching by publication title in English, the platform retrieves not only titles written in English but also those in Armenian and Russian, displaying their metadata in English.

This creates two key advantages: first, it allows the English-speaking scientific community to access and engage with Armenian scholarly output not originally published in English; second, it establishes the platform as a unique tool for assessing the impact of Armenian scientific institutions, journals, and authors.

In addition to the available bibliographic metadata, ASCI records provide valuable citation-related metric, ASCI Times Cited, for robust bibliometric analyses. Furthermore, the platform furnishes information on Cited References and the Cited Reference Count, enabling researchers to delve into the scholarly influence of a given work by examining the sources it cites and the volume of references it encompasses. These metrics enrich the bibliographic data and, empower users to conduct comprehensive citation analyses and assess the impact and relevance of scholarly contributions within their respective fields. The system operates on open access basis to fulfill its aim of visibility. In the case of publication and institutional citations, the calculation is based on citations received from publications entered into the ASCI database. In the case of author citations, in addition to citations received from publications entered into ASCI, citations to the authors’ works appearing in the reference lists of those publications may also be taken into account.

As of now, the ASCI have the following records: 26,865 publications, 844 organizations, 381,000 references. These numbers are steadily growing. The coverage of the ASCI goes back to 2007. Data for this article was extracted on May 10, 2026. The data set under study consists of 26,600 records for the 2007-2024 period (Figure 2).

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The records’ subject fields were classified into 16 fields according to the subject field classification by Glänzel and Schubert (2003): Agriculture and Environment (AGRI); Biology (BIOL); Biosciences (BIOS); Biomedical Research (BIOM); Clinical and Experimental Medicine (CLIN); Neuroscience and Behavior (NEUR); Chemistry (CHEM); Physics (PHYS); Geosciences and Space Sciences (GEOS); Engineering (ENGN); Mathematics (MATH); Social Sciences (SOCSCI); Art and Humanities (ART&HUM); Multidisciplinary Sciences (MULT). Full count method is used.

The journal category and not the topics covered in the individual publications were taken as a basis of analyzing the disciplinary coverage in ASCI. Figures 3 summarizes the share of records by research area in the database.

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When summarizing the shares of the number of papers into broad domains, it becomes evident that ASCI contains more journals in the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences categories. This is explained by a general tendency of scholars in SSH to publish in domestic journals and the local natures of social sciences and humanities studies (Moed et al., 2021).

The analysis of documents indexed in the ASCI shows that the database is currently composed of predominantly research articles: close to 94% of documents indexed are articles. In second place are proceeding papers (3%). The other document types collectively make up the remaining 3% of the database. Figure 4 shows the share of documents per type in the database.

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Table 1 shows the coverage of records in terms of language of publications in ASCI. As there are local journals that publish in several languages, we have performed the language analysis on the record level. Armenian dominates the database with 10,691 publications, representing a share of around 40%. The second most represented language is Russian, which is still the second language of communication in Armenia, with 9,852 records (37%), followed by 5,936 publications in English (22%). Publications in French, German and Spanish constitute a tiny percentage, less than 0.1% of this database.

The ASCI has also publications from foreign authors and their geography is quite wide. There are publications from 68 states. Some of the publications are co-authored with the Armenian colleagues, others are only by foreigners. Figure 5 represents the first 20 states that have authors represented at the ASCI database. Authors from Russia have the majority of publication in the ASCI, followed by USA, Ukraine and China. Meanwhile, in terms of collaborative papers, works with Russian co-authors are again on the first place, followed by USA, then France and Germany. Among the foreign authors that publish without Armenian co-authors in ASCI, the first three positions are distributed in the following way: Russia - 394, Ukraine - 66, USA- 61, China - 50, India - 49 and Indonesia - 46 records.

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THE ARMENIAN SCIENCE CITATION INDEX IN THE CONTEXT OF NATIONAL AND REGIONAL CITATION DATABASES

As discussed above, the development of ASCI should be situated within the broader emergence of national and regional citation databases designed to complement international multidisciplinary indexes such as WoS and Scopus. Despite substantial differences in scale and institutional setting, the underlying rationale of initiatives such as KCI, CSCD, RSCI, the SciELO Citation Index, and ARCI is comparable to that of ASCI. These databases seek to capture research outputs that are inadequately represented in international citation indexes, enhance the discoverability of locally produced knowledge, and generate bibliometric data for assessing journals, authors, institutions, and national research systems. ASCI performs a comparable function within the Armenian research system, albeit on a considerably smaller scale. The database’s size should be understood in relation to the scale of Armenia’s research and publishing system rather than as evidence of a fundamentally different type of infrastructure. Indeed, one advantage of a national citation index operating within a relatively small scientific community is the possibility of more extensive authority control and manual verification of author identities, institutional affiliations, publication titles, and cited references.

Multilingual information retrieval is therefore a particularly important feature of ASCI. Comparable national and regional databases have developed language-specific solutions: CSCD enables searches of Chinese research in both Chinese and English; KCI provides access to Korean scholarly literature through Korean- and English-language metadata; and ARCI offers Arabic- and English-language interfaces. Similarly, SciELO enhances the international discoverability of research published in several languages. ASCI follows the same general principle while adapting it to the distinctive linguistic environment of Armenian scholarship. At the same time, ASCI differs from more mature citation indexes in its current approach to journal coverage. CSCD, KCI, RSCI, the SciELO Citation Index, and ARCI apply various forms of journal evaluation, accreditation, or editorial selection. KCI, for example, distinguishes between accredited and candidate journals, while inclusion in ARCI requires an assessment of publishing standards, bibliographic information, peer-review procedures, editorial structure, and cited references. RSCI similarly established a selective core of Russian journals using bibliometric indicators and expert evaluation. ASCI currently follows a more inclusive model: the requirement is that journals should be peer-reviewed and their content be available for indexing; no other formal selection criteria are applied. Its immediate objective is to achieve broad coverage of Armenian scholarly publishing, while the planned establishment of an ASCI Core Collection is intended to introduce a more selective layer. In this respect, ASCI’s current structure may be understood as representing an earlier stage in a developmental trajectory also observed in other national citation systems.

ASCI also differs from several comparable databases in terms of institutional integration. CSCD, KCI, the SciELO Citation Index, and ARCI are currently hosted on the WoS platform, allowing their records and citation relationships to interact with a substantially larger international discovery environment. RSCI was likewise available through WoS until its removal from the platform in May 2022. ASCI, by contrast, currently operates independently. Its use of Crossref APIs for metadata acquisition provides a degree of technical interoperability with the international scholarly information ecosystem; however, this should be distinguished from integration into an international citation network such as WoS.

Another notable characteristic of ASCI is its integration of bibliographic and citation data with the full texts supplied by participating Armenian journals. Full-text availability makes it possible not only to identify cited references but also to check citation contexts in the attached full texts. This feature extends the system’s analytical potential beyond simple citation counting by enabling users to examine the textual contexts in which publications are cited. Although full-text integration is also central to systems such as SciELO and is available in various forms in KCI and other national infrastructures, citation-context extraction represents a particularly valuable feature of ASCI. It also creates opportunities for future research into the nature and function of citations within Armenian scholarly communication. This comparison indicates that ASCI belongs to the same broad family of national and regional citation infrastructures, while also reflecting the particular scale, linguistic environment, and institutional structure of Armenian science. Its significance lies less in the absolute number of records it contains than in its capacity to represent a segment of Armenian scholarly production that remains largely invisible in international citation databases. In this sense, ASCI serves two interconnected purposes: it provides a more comprehensive evidence base for the analysis and evaluation of Armenian research, while simultaneously enhancing the discoverability of Armenian scholarly output beyond the domestic research community.

CONCLUSION

This paper has introduced and analyzed the Armenian Science Citation Index (ASCI), one of the newest national citation indices, offering an in-depth account of its development, structure, and current capabilities. By situating ASCI within the broader context of national and regional citation infrastructures, the study contributes to the growing body of literature concerned with bibliometric tools designed to address the underrepresentation of local-language and locally published research in global indexing platforms. The ASCI serves as a practical and scalable model for countries facing similar challenges, particularly those with relatively small scientific communities or limited inclusion in international databases.

The research offers several concrete benefits and practical implications. First, the ASCI system enables comprehensive access to and evaluation of the national scientific community in Armenia, a critical function, as the majority of local publications are not indexed in international databases such as WoS or Scopus. This ensures that domestic scholarly output is not excluded from performance assessments and policy planning. Second, by documenting the architecture and operational logic of the platform, this study provides a replicable roadmap for the development of similar infrastructures in other underrepresented regions. Third, ASCI enhances the international visibility of Armenian research by consolidating and standardizing bibliographic data, including multilingual metadata and citation metrics. This facilitates broader scholarly engagement and makes Armenian science more accessible to international researchers, institutions, and funding agencies. Finally, the platform supports evidence-based policymaking and strategic planning by providing a centralized and transparent source of data for evaluating national research performance across disciplines and institutions.

Future research may build on these findings by conducting more granular citation analyses, mapping disciplinary trends, and evaluating the evolving impact of ASCI on publication behavior and institutional research strategies. In addition, the platform’s future trajectory-whether through integration into international open repositories or expansion as a regional index-presents valuable opportunities for continued investigation into sustainable, inclusive, and open approaches to scholarly communication and evaluation.

ABBREVIATIONS

ASCI

Armenian Science Citation Index

WoS

Web of Science

SSH

Social Sciences and Humanities

CSIAM

Center for Scientific Information Analysis and Monitoring

SCI

Science Citation Index

CSCD

Chinese Science Citation Database

SciELO

Scientific Electronic Library Online

RISC

Russian Index of Scientific Citation

ARCI

Arabic Citation Index

KCI

Korea Citation Index

NRF

National Research Foundation of Korea

SCIndeks

Serbian Citation Index

AGRI

Agriculture and Environment

BIOL

Biology

BIOS

Biosciences

BIOM

Biomedical Research

CLIN

Clinical and Experimental Medicine

NEUR

Neuroscience and Behavior

CHEM

Chemistry

PHYS

Physics

GEOS

Geosciences and Space Sciences

ENGN

Engineering

MATH

Mathematics

SOCSCI

Social Sciences

ART&HUM

Arts and Humanities

MULT

Multidisciplinary Sciences.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

FUNDING

The work was supported by the Science Committee of MESCS RA, in the frames of the research project № 20TTCG-5I013.