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Библиометрия фольклора: русские пословицы в научных журналах
This article examines the use of proverbs in academic texts—specifically, articles published in Russian research journals. For the experiment, ten proverbs were selected as the intersection of two fundamentally different paremiological surveys aimed at compiling lists of popular or common Russian proverbs. One of these surveys was conducted by the classic of paremiology, G.L. Permyakov, in the 1970s, while the other was recently carried out online among students from universities in Tomsk and Moscow. By searching the entire eLIBRARY.RU platform and subsequently reviewing the full texts of the retrieved documents on an article-by-article basis, a "paremiological corpus" was assembled—a set of journal articles published over the ten-year period from 2014 to 2023 in which one of the ten target proverbs appears. Only instances where the proverbs are used by the authors as apt quotations, rather than as objects of independent study, epigraphs, fragments from other works, or the like, were singled out. In this way, 458 articles were selected for the study. Using bibliometric analysis methods, the frequency and “thematic profile” of the paremiological corpus as a whole, as well as of each individual proverb, were determined. The set of authors of the publications in the corpus, along with their affiliated organizations, was also examined. The leading proverb proved to be "No smoke without fire," which occurred 107 times. It was found that, in the majority of cases, even authors who do use proverbs do so extremely rarely—once every ten years—meaning that there are practically no scholars who are particularly "fond of" catchphrases. Most articles containing proverbs are written by a single author, with no co-authors. The study revealed no dependence of proverb frequency on the geographical location of the scholars’ workplaces; the hypothesis of a possible predisposition toward using proverbs among authors "from the regions" was not confirmed. In terms of thematic areas, philosophy and pedagogy dominate the corpus (with art history and cultural studies also leading in relative terms). Furthermore, proverbs are fairly clearly divided into "discipline-specific" ones, found predominantly in articles from a single scientific field, and more or less "universal" ones, which appear across various areas of science. In addition to the comprehensive analysis across the entire eLIBRARY.RU platform, special attention is paid in this article to the occurrence of proverbs in "top-level" journals that constitute the core of the Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI). It was found that only 13% of the publications in the corpus appeared in journals included in the RSCI core. It can also be observed that different proverbs demonstrate significantly varying degrees of "suitability" for use in high-level journals.