Global Russian Studies: Quantitative Methodologies and the Production of Academic Knowledge

The aim of our study is the academic expertise of knowledge about Russia through the worldwide search and ranking of academic institutions. Conventionally, one can single out the main journals and conferences on Russian studies. However, studies carried out about Russia are presented in other disciplines (sociology, political science) or fields (higher education studies). Therefore, we decided to analyse not only publications in journals recognised as belonging to the field of Russian studies but also include others that contribute to knowledge about Russia in social sciences and humanities. This gives the unique view of the community of scholars that do not necessarily identify themselves with Russian studies. We can see how they integrate local knowledge into the system of global knowledge production. We develop a methodology and implement the collection of the necessary data for ranking institutions in the field of research about Russia from the WoS database. This project will result in a global ranking of academic organizations; methodology for constructing rankings for interdisciplinary areas; scientometric analysis of the field of Russian studies.

We wanted to answer with our study:

• What is written about Russia?
• Who writes papers about Russia?
• Where are located the most successful authors with publications about Russia?