INION contains hundreds of thousands of records for materials not only in Slavic, East European & Eurasian languages, but also international languages from nearly every country in the world, particularly English. The Academy of Sciences Library conducts bibliographic exchanges with 874 enterprises from 69 nations from around the world. It contains many special collections for Russia, particularly documents from international organizations including the League of Nations, the United Nations, UNESCO, as well as government documents from other countries, especially the United States and Great Britain.
The unified INION database can now only be accessed through EBSCO. On most subscribing libraries' database resources portals, this can be accessed by typing "Russian Acaedmy of Sciences Bibliographies." This allows patrons to search INION via basic or advanced searching using terms in Russian, written in Cyrillic, although searching in Latin script can also be useful for some searches.
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. Following the link should take one to EBSCO, which is currently the vendor for INION in many U.S. institutions.
INION is a very large and extremely useful database, especially for Russian-language materials. Containing over 3.5 million 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/index6.php. EBSCO provides full access to INION to subscribers, available here for UIUC users:
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" (68 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. For the most part, all titles will be given in transliteration from Russian. Searching must be done in cyrillic, not in transliteration, for best results.
Subjects covered: humanities, religion, philosophy, Slavic studies, political science, social sciences, economics and art. Other useful additions have been made recently, especially for the Russian public. For example, it is now possible to access multiple foreign databases through INION here.
Available on the open Web as a set of databases separated by subject or chronology at http://www.inion.ru/index6.php
