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Multilingual Electronic Resources for Slavic, East European & Eurasian Studies: Citation Indexes

A guide to 13 databases with significant content in both English and the languages of the region

Transliteration

The Citation Indexes do not consistently use the Library of Congress transliteration system for Russian, i.e., "Gryakolova", not "Griakolova", but "Russkaia literatura", not "Russkaya literatura". Tables that include other, less common transliteration systems can be found here.

Linguistic coverage

It is difficult to determine how many items in a particular language are indexed in the Citation Indexes.  The Citation Indexes do, however, duplicate the material indexed in another Thompson-ISI database, Current Contents. Current Contents has been evolving, and currently provides full analytics of utilization of journals citations, including by whom, when and where. By choosing "Journal Citation Reports," one can examine by field, either sciences or social sciences, or choose to view journal usage by field or even examine a particular journal. For example, the flagship journal of Russian and East European studies, the Slavic Review, has carried articles that have been cited by authors carried by 50 other leading peer-reviewed journals in the field 356 times over the past 24 years, according to ISI Web of Knowledge Analytics used by Current Contents. These numbers are then computed through a specialized matrix to come up with an Impact Factor of 0.655 over the most recent five years of data tracking, 2009-2013. The American Historical Review had an Impact Factor of 1.463 over these same years. These numbers are intended to give some notion of a particular journal's breadth of readership and academic influence, which may be useful for some researchers.

Cited reference searching

Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts & Humanities Citation Index can be searched individually, but are presented by the vendor as part of their "Web of Science" package, which also includes a citation index for the natural sciences. Web of Science, in turn, is packaged with a number of other databases by default when these resources are first accessed. This package is accessible here (once at the University of Illinois' Online Journals and Databases page, choose one of the two links--both leading to Thomas Reuters databases. Once the Discover page is opened, again click on the title of the database or the "Go," which will then take you to the database and allow interactive searching. Once there, click on the "Select a Database" or "Web of Science" tabs to avoid searching the entire package.

  • "Cited reference searching allows you to navigate forward, backward, and through the journal literature to uncover information relevant to your research."
  • "Citation indexing uses the cited references in published articles as index terms. It exploits the formal linkages between papers established by the authors themselves."
  • Citations can be followed and citation patterns analyzed using a variety of tools.
  • Part of the ISI Web of Science, which focuses primarily on materials in the hard sciences.
  • "Social Sciences Citation Index® – to 1956 fully indexes over 1,950 journals across 50 social science disciplines, as well as 3,500 of the world’s leading scientific and technical journals"
  • "Arts & Humanities Citation Index® –to 1975 fully indexes over 1,160 arts and humanities journals, as well as selected items from over 6,000 scientific and social sciences journals"

Retrospective coverage for the arts & humanities has been extended back to 1975, and for the social sciences back to 1970 (from 1980 when this guide was first created). Other institutions may have purchased access to additional retrospective material.

Articles are only included if the author or publisher provides English-language titles, abstracts and keywords -- i.e., out of millions of records, only 58,015 are in Russian, and many of these are from non-Russian journals.

Cited reference searching through these databases for materials in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian languages is obviously far from comprehensive. Cited reference searching for materials in English about the region will cover more sources, but since the Citation Indexes are general databases with no particular emphasis on Eastern Europe and the CIS, these results must also not be considered to be comprehensive.

The Citation Indexes can be used to find out how many times (and where and by whom) a particular article has been cited, or to find out what other articles have cited the same sources as the article in question. Here's an example of an article:

By clicking on Related Records, we find that the article was cited six years later:

Subject Guide

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Slavic Reference Service
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