Building Balkan Studies: Multidisciplinary Resources  Tags: slavic  

As of May 2008, INION contained records for materials in Slavic, East European & Eurasian languages as follows (numbers of English-, German-, French-, and Chinese-language records in INION are included for comparison):

• Russian: 616,548
• English: 284,896
• German: 79,582
• French: 52,516
• Polish: 40,178
• Bulgarian: 23,621
• Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian: 16,327
• Chinese: 13,493
• Ukrainian: 11,575
• Czech: 11,171
• Hungarian: 11,105
• Romanian: 8,661
• Slovak: 4,598
• Slovenian: 3,479
• Belarusian: 2,864
• Macedonian: 1,683
• Georgian: 1,352
• Lithuanian: 1,101
• Armenian: 895
• Azerbaijani: 405
• Albanian: 398 (all but one from 1991 or before)
• Estonian: 356
• Kazakh: 252
• Moldavian: 190
• Latvian: 153
• Uzbek: 111
• Turkmen: 79
• Tajik: 70
• Kyrgyz: 52
• Bashkir: 33
• Tatar: 16

NOTE: Bibliographic information (i.e., titles) for items in Eurasian languages (Georgian, Armenian, Kazakh, etc.) tends to be given in Russian translation.

Following the merger of Eureka with OCLC in 2007, the unified INION database can now only be accessed through an OCLC interface. This offers certain advantages over the previous interface, including the ability (familiar to users of WorldCat) to sort huge results lists by publication date or other criteria, and the ability of the database to indicate which libraries, according to WorldCat, hold the monograph or journal in question. On the downside, in the former interface users could click on article titles and be taken to an alphabetical title index, or on journal titles to generate a list of all articles INION had indexed from that journal.

Digital copies of most articles in the INION database are available directly from INION.  Details are provided in both Russian and English at the INION website.

ИНИОН (i.e., INION) stands for Институт Научной Информации по Общественным Наукам, i.e. The Institute of Scientific Information for Social Sciences.  Since this institute is a unit of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the database is listed as "Russian Academy of Sciences Bibliographies" in most Western libraries.

INION is a very large and extremely useful database, especially for Russian-language materials. Containing over 1,200,000 records for articles, books, manuscripts and dissertations in the humanities and social sciences published since 1980, INION offers a breadth of bibliographic access to Slavic and East European journal articles that is not approached by any other single database.

12,500+ journals indexed, primarily from Russia, the CIS, and Eastern Europe. These journals are listed on INION's own website (see below for more details) at http://www.inion.ru/product/eksi_A-c.html.

Includes articles, books, manuscripts, dissertations

In the majority of cases it is best to search INION using the Cyrillic script, as the following searches for "Ceauşescu" (14 results) vs. "Чаушеску" (62 results) demonstrate:

As the following record from the search for "Чаушеску" shows, INION records include broad, clickable Russian-language descriptors, some of which are also translated into English. This record also happens to include a very brief abstract in Russian, which is common but by no means universal.

 Subjects covered: humanities, religion, philosophy, Slavic studies, political science, social sciences, economics and art

Available on the open Web as a set of databases separated by subject or chronology at http://www.inion.ru/index6.php