2019 Issue №1

This article is devoted to the western border regions of Russia, which play an important role in terms of history, geopolitics, geoeconomy, culture, and mind­set. Relying on the interpretations of ‘border’, ‘frontier’, and ‘border­lands’, which are traditional for Russian limnology, I outline the geo-concept of ‘wes­tern border regions of Russia’ and provide a rationale for its under­standing as a continuous-discrete, dynamic, multi-scale, transboundary socio-geogra­phi­cal phenomenon. I pay particular attention to the principles of, and approach­es to, the delimitation of western border regions. As a result, I classi­fy seventeen constituent entities of Russia as western border regions. Another focus is the structuring of border regions based on environmental, climatic, positional, polit­ical-territorial, resource and economic, settlement-related, and other factors. I provide a multi-criteria typology in view of the actual and po­tential effect of ge­opolitical and geoeconomic turbulence on regional socioeco­nomic systems.

The article focuses on the approaches that explain the essence of scien­to­metrics as a set of methods for studying science. The paper also discusses the use of scientometric instruments in the spatial analysis of the geography of knowledge. The countries of the Baltic region were taken as an example. The empirical base of the research was the international database Scopus and an analytical tool for monitoring and analyzing scientific research — SciVal. On the basis of three methods of spatial scientometrics, the main aspects of the pub­lication activity of selected countries were analyzed. The results of the stu­dy showed that scientometrics is an important basis for analyzing the degree of countries and regions scientific potential development, and its methods ma­ke it possible to study the dependence of scientific productivity on a specific spa­tial level, to identify the most relevant and popular research topics and as­sess international relations between organizations and individual authors.