Urban History in academic dissertation researches in Russia (1991-2021)

Abstract

The database "Dissertations on Urban History" was created in order to study the trends in the development of Russian historiography in the field of historical urban studies in 1991-2021. The source of information for the database is the electronic catalog of academic researches (dissertations) of the Russian State Library, posted on the official website of the organization www.rsl.ru. More than 25 thousand dissertation researches were made during this period. 523 dissertations were selected by expert means, whose topics corresponded to the field of urban history. For further work, an electronic database was created, including 6 bibliographic and 7 analytical attributes. To analyze the database, an approach was applied based on calculating the frequency of occurrence of individual keywords characterizing each of the following attributes: author, title of the work, year, code of scientific specialty, academic degree, chronological period, territorial scope, scale of research optics, thematic direction. According to the results of the work carried out, it was possible to establish that despite some conjunctural similarities with the Western tradition, Russian authors are distinguished by increased attention to the historical period of the second half of the XIX - early XX centuries, academic research focus on the problems of social history.