The Russian voluntary network society Dissernet use to study different types of unethical behavior of Russian scientists: plagiarism in dissertations, publication misconduct and other types of pseudo-scientific activities. Since the beginning of Russian-Ukrainian war, we wanted to know if there is any correlation between the “quality” of a scientist and his/her pro-war position
First of all we compared such correlation in the area of ethics violations. To do so, several groups of scientist were compared: those who signed pro-war or anti-war petitions . In each group we calculated the percentage of so-called Dissernet-persons: people who are in Dissernet database as having various violations of scientific ethics. The highest percentage has been found among rectors of Russian universities who signed a notorious “rectors’ letter” supporting the war and Russian president (which has disastrous consequences for the universities headed by these people, because after this letter many foreign organisations interrupted their scientific contracts with these universities). It also turned out that the percentage of Dissernet-persons is dramatically lower among scientists who have signed an anti-war petition than inside other groups of scientists who signed a pro-war petition.
Also studied was the correlation between bibliometric indicators of the scientists who support the war comparing to the scientists who make no public statements to the subject and those who openly oppose the war. It turns out that the higher the international rating of a scientist, the more negative is his/her attitude towards the special military operation. We found a clear correlation between the average rating of the journal in which scientists are published and cited, and the position of these scientists: low-cited and low-ranking publications are among pro-war scientists, in the middle – the scientists who are “silent”, and highly rated are the scientists who openly express the position against the war.
The explanation of these results seems clear. The scientists who support the war base their position on the false facts (like fascism in the Ukraine, etc.) or propaganda hypotheses (if we had not attacked first, they would have attacked us) – which means that such scientists lack scientific methodology and are driven by irrational thinking and conspiracy theories.
“silent”,