The Quality of Postgraduate Training after Reforms in the Russian System of Science and Higher Education

The reform of the system of postgraduate study was of a complex nature in Russia in the previous decade. In 2013, in addition to the reduction of organisations with the right to train PhD students and/or award degrees, postgraduate studies were reformed and the requirements for applicants were changed. Decades later, it is important from both a research and practical point of view to answer the question of whether these systemic changes have resulted in more productive researchers. The impact of this reform has been assessed until now only by generalised indicators such as the proportion of graduates from postgraduate studies or the proportion of theses defence (Vlasova, 2021; Guba&Sokolov, 2019; Zhuchkova&Bekova, 2023, etc.). These studies give an idea of the current state and dynamics of the postgraduate institute. However, the issues of assessing the quality of training of young specialists remain out of the focus of these scientific works. Did the reform contribute to the training and attraction of more productive researchers to the research sector?

We assess the effects of the postgraduate reform and the change in the rules for awarding PhDs by studying various characteristics of the publication activity of researchers who defended themselves in the period before and after the changes. For this purpose we use the large dataset of more than 10 000 Russian researchers which defended their theses in 2012 and 2016 years in six fields of studies. The dataset contains data on researchers’ organisations where they prepared their theses and on their publications, indexed in the large Russian bibliometric database.

Difference-in-difference is going to be used to evaluate the effect of the reform. We expect that the reform increased the proportion of researchers who stayed to work in academia and it increased the quality of researchers’ publications before and after thesis defense.