University centers of human geography research in Russia: Scientometric analysis

Abstract

This paper analyzes the publication activity of the teaching staff of the geographical departments of Russian universities which specialize in economic, social, political and recreational geography over the past decade. The aim of this work was to find out the peculiarities of territorial differentiation of publication activity of Russian universities’ staff. We analyzed more than 25 000 scientific publications indexed by the scientometric databases RSCI and Scopus. The authors of these publications were full-time employees of 46 Russian universities. It was determined that significant differences between the publication activity of different universities are connected with the presence of traditional scientific schools and are weakly dependent on both the number of department employees and the status and material base of the university. The hypothesis that the correlation between the “specialization” of scientists in physical or human geography depends on the level of development and natural features of the region was not confirmed. Of all the areas of human geography, the least developed and popular was political geography. A fairly low publication activity of human geographers working at universities was noted. On average, each staff member of the studied universities wrote only seven articles on human geography from 2010 to 2019 (less than one paper per year).