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Current data for Russian universities are given in the table 1. For comparison the data for Ecole Normale Superior de Lion (ENSL) are also given. The last column provides the actual values of the citations per paper indicator for the 5 top 100 universities, listed in THE WUR along with ENSL data (see the detailed excel file attached). The kilo-authors papers were excluded from the citations count.

The discrepancy between the "citation" indicator values, released by THE and the actual citations per paper data is obvious for Peter the Great St Petersburg Polytechnic University, Kazan Federal University and Tomsk Polytechnic University. For these universities the indicator "Citations" is much higher than for MEPhI, MIPT and NSU, which in fact have much higher citations per paper value. While we do realize that our "citations per paper" values do not account for the subject correction, this correction itself cannot explain the observed discrepancies. Indeed, subject profiles of universities such as SPbPU, NSU, MIPT, TPU are very close (see the attached printscreens), so the subject normalization should not change much their relative positions on citations per paper.

Table 1. THE WUR 2015-2016 data for some Russian universities and Ecole Normale Superior de Lion.

Recent information from THE agency is that they use the data from Elsevier and don't process the Scopus by themselves. In light of the recent change in THE methodology, the most probable reason is that country based normalization was still used for some universities, which received the greatest citation scores, while citations data for others were normalized on the world basis.

In order to check this assumption, we made rough estimates through comparison of the citation per paper values for Russian universities with that for ENSL. Actual value of ENSL is equal to CE = 5.8, and its score is SE = 69. We estimate the probable "citations" score (SR) for any Russian university using its actual citation per paper values as SR = CR/CE*SE. Table 2 shows the results of the estimation. While being very rough, the use of proportion instead of Z-score provides reasonable agreement with published "citations" score for all Russian universities, except SPbPU, KFU and TPU.The correlation between our actual values of citations per paper from Scopus and "citations" scores released by THE is excellent, besides three forementioned universities (figure 1).

Figure 1. The correlation between actual citations per paper values and released "citations" score for Russian universities.

We have also estimated the effect this correction would have on the positions of Russian universities in THE WUR. The result is presented in table 2.

Table 2. Recalculated "Citations" score and estimated corrected position in ranking for Russian universities.

Supporting materials.