Multilingual Electronic Resources for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies  Tags: slavic east_european research_methods russian technology  

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.

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.

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.

INION (accessible via subscription or via the open web) 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.

Over 12,500 journals are indexed, primarily from Russia, the CIS, and Eastern Europe. These journals are listed on INION's own website at http://www.inion.ru/product/eksi_A-c.html (for Cyrillic-script journals) and http://www.inion.ru/product/Eksi_a-L.htm (for Latin-script journals).  In addition to individual journal articles, books, book chapters, articles from edited volumes/sborniki, manuscripts, and dissertations are also indexed.  Subjects covered include "humanities, religion, philosophy, Slavic studies, political science, social sciences, economics and art."

Each interface (subscription vs. open web) has its advantages and disadvantages.  INION is actually comprised of a number of smaller bibliographies covering individual disciplines (such as literature, government and law, etc.)  The subscription interface through OCLC FirstSearch allows the user to search all of these databases at once, while on INION's own website, the discipline-specific bibliographies must be searched separately.  For non-interdisciplinary inquiries, this can be an advantage; for interdisciplinary ones, a disadvantage.  It is possible to search all disciplines simultaneously on INION's website, but only in three-year chunks (i.e., items published between 1996 and 1998, 1999 and 2001, etc.).  On the other hand, INION's own interface appears to provide less erratic search results and some useful search options not available through OCLC.  For several years, the material available through INION's own interface was also much more current than that available through OCLC, although this appears to have been corrected at the time of this writing.

In many cases it is best to search INION using the Cyrillic script, as the following searches for "Ceauşescu" (16 results) vs. "Чаушеску" (65 results) demonstrate (click to enlarge).  In other cases, the Latin-script version may be more successful (i.e., 438 results for "putin" as a keyword vs. 411 for "путин" as of October 2009).  Until and unless these result lists are harmonized, it is probably best for scholars to perform their searches in both Cyrillic and Latin.  Transliteration, of course, can be an issue.  In the main, INION appears to be using the ISO system, which appears in a table here.

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.