Abstract

The information technology development significantly influences on the scholarly communication system by means of transformation. Such processes open new opportunities for improvements of the research performance assessment. The first part of the article characterizes the approaches and methods of research performance assessment, adopted in Russia and some European countries to evaluate individual scientists and research teams. The common features and shortcomings are under discussion, while the most notable among them are the following: inability to track the citation motivation, inability to address to the competitiveness of the every individual scientist and the progress of current research. However, we conclude that the modern research information systems with new approaches to research performance indicators calculation and its visualization become a platform for the scholarly communication improvement. They help in preventing research duplication, finding opportunities for research collaboration, etc. The role of such systems, therefore, is dual – first, they provide current monitoring of research activities and, second, suggest transformation path. This transformation, in turn, provides opportunities for improvement of the research performance assessment. The article’s second section analyzes new trends and prospects of the research environment development and scientific communication. We demonstrate how these trends can contribute to the creation of the fundamentally new tools for the research performance assessment. The third section discusses the Russian research information system Socionet, as a particular example of new technological environment for scholarly communication. The transformative impact and the potential of this system, as well as the created new opportunities for the research performance assessment – are all under discussion.