Assoc. Prof. Dr. Maria Vodenicharova: A Key Priority for the UNWE is to Become a Significant Scientific and Educational Center

Vice Rector for Research Assoc. Prof. Dr. Maria Vodenicharova about the priorities in R&D

Assoc. Prof.  Vodenicharova, what are the priorities of UNWE in terms of research activities?

The objective of UNWE is to turn into a significant scientific and educational center for being a strategic partner and a worthy competitor within the European Research Area. The main directions we will work on in the coming years include the improvement of the institutional ecosystem for the research activities development.

We should focus not only on increasing the research activity by expanding the participation of the UNWE in the European Research Area and improving the international scientific cooperation, but also on expanding the education-science-business relation by promoting the innovation based on scientific results.

UNWE is one of the best digitalized universities in the country, but it is necessary to constantly build new technologies and increase the level of digitalization. Regarding the research activities, we work hard to expand the digital applications. Currently, we work on building fully electronic career advancement cards and electronic appraisal reports for the academic staff of UNWE which will greatly facilitate the lecturers.

The other objective is to activate the PhD students, to expand the PhD space and their active involvement in the academic life of UNWE. We currently organize a large-scale event for PhD students related to youth entrepreneurship and raising the competences of PhD students in terms of the skills that an entrepreneur should have and how to take an innovative idea to the market. All of this goes hand in hand with achieving the criteria for a research university, which are described in the Council of Ministers Decree No. 226 on the designation of research universities and the conditions and procedures for updating the list of research universities.

How will you support the researchers?

The UNWE continues to stimulate the research staff through funding under the National Programme for Stimulating Publication Activity in Reputable International Scientific Journals and Open Access to Scientific Information. However, it is necessary to promote the culture of sharing scientific information with open access, as it is a prerequisite for higher visibility of publications, increasing the personal citation index, the possibility of collaborations, and raising the position of the University at the global level.

One of the areas we work in to achieve all of this is the building of an academic publishing house and the enhancement of publishing services to support the overall publication process and to increase the indexing of conference proceedings and books in global databases. The objective is to build an infrastructure that supports the overall process for the individual researcher, Departments and Faculties.

The UNWE also has a Library Contact Point for researchers. What is its purpose?

At the initiative of the Rector of the UNWE Prof. Dr. Dimitar Dimitrov, a place was created in the lecturers reading room of the University Library called Library Contact Point where assistance is provided to the lecturers and young scientists for creating author profiles in Scopus ID, ORCID, Researcher ID, Google Scholar, etc. and consulting on the scientific-metric databases. We hope that it will increase the visibility of the research of UNWE scholars as well as enhance the research activity and research quality.

In the lecturers reading room the researchers could obtain information on current publications in Scopus and Web of Science, receive assistance in verifying the credibility and distribution of quartiles of journals, assistance in retrieving publications and citations of UNWE researchers and lecturers in the Scopus and Web of Science databases.