Poljarnyj Vestnik

About Poljarnyj Vestnik

Poljarnyj Vestnik — Journal at a Glance

Overview

Poljarnyj vestnik — the name means, in Russian, the polar messenger or polar herald — is a Norwegian peer-reviewed online open-access journal of Slavic studies, published from Tromsø in the far north of Norway. Its own About page defines it in one sentence that this profile follows closely: it publishes original research about Slavic languages, literatures and cultures, submissions from all disciplines within Slavic studies are welcome, and interdisciplinary research is encouraged. That is the whole scope architecture. Slavic linguistics, Slavic literary studies and Slavic cultural studies are the three pillars, and work that crosses between them — a linguistic argument with literary evidence, a cultural history grounded in language, a study of Arctic and northern encounters between Russian and Norwegian worlds — sits naturally inside the journal's remit.

The journal's northern identity is more than a postal address. It began as working papers connected with the University of Tromsø, it is owned by UiT The Arctic University of Norway, it is published on behalf of the Norwegian Slavists' Association, and its pages have carried, alongside mainstream Slavic linguistics and literature, thematic work on Svalbard and on Russo-Norwegian encounters in the Arctic. The 2022 volume's Svalbard Studies material, introduced as growing out of workshops in Longyearbyen and Tromsø marking the centenary of the Svalbard Treaty, shows the journal doing something few other Slavic journals attempt: treating the High North as a Slavic-studies subject in its own right, where Russian mining settlements, Norwegian sovereignty and multilingual contact meet.

For the JournalsWorld reader, three identity facts matter most and are sometimes flattened in directory records. First, the full journal is not only the short title on this post. DOAJ records it as Poljarnyj Vestnik: Norwegian Journal of Slavic Studies, with Poljarnyj Vestnik as its alternative title, and that fuller form states its field and its national home in a way the short title alone does not. Second, it has two ISSNs, and this record originally carried only one of them — a point taken up in the identifier section below. Third, it is a genuinely open-access journal with no author charges, a fact verified both on its own site and in its DOAJ record, not a subscription journal with an open option.

Identity and Identifiers

This record is anchored to the JournalsWorld post titled Poljarnyj Vestnik, slug poljarnyj-vestnik, status published, which before this profile carried a template text of 244 words. That record stored a single ISSN, 1890-9671, gave the publisher in its taxonomy as Septentrio Academic Publishing (taxonomy term 5182), placed the journal in Norway, and reported an h-index of 1.

The journal itself gives two ISSNs, in the footer of its own site and on its About page: ISSN 1500-7502 for the printed version and ISSN 1890-9671 for the electronic version. DOAJ's record agrees exactly, listing pISSN 1500-7502 and eISSN 1890-9671 for Poljarnyj Vestnik: Norwegian Journal of Slavic Studies. OpenAlex tells the same story from the citation side: resolved through its ISSN endpoint for 1890-9671, it returns source S4210221386, named Poljarnyj vestnik, whose ISSN-L is 1500-7502 and whose ISSN list is 1500-7502 and 1890-9671. The stored record is therefore incomplete rather than wrong: 1890-9671 is the correct electronic ISSN, and 1500-7502, the print ISSN and the linking ISSN, should be read alongside it. That is the first corrections-pass item for this post.

The second correction concerns the h-index. The template record reported an h-index of 1. The OpenAlex source record in hand reports an h-index of 5 for the same source, with 154 works and 123 citations in total. Index h-values differ by database and by date, and a figure from Scopus-based sources may differ again, so this profile does not declare one database's number to be the journal's permanent h-index. It does record that the stored figure of 1 is not supported by the OpenAlex record consulted here, which gives 5, and that any future update of the record's metric field should name its source and date.

Transliteration explains most apparent title variation. The journal's own site uses Poljarnyj vestnik with a lower-case second word and the Norwegian-influenced transliteration with j after vowels; catalogues also render the title as Polyarny Vestnik or Poljarnyj Vestnik. These are transliteration variants of the same Russian title, Полярный вестник, not different journals. No twin journal post with overlapping own-ISSNs was found in the twin check for this batch: the candidates returned by title and ISSN searches were fetched directly, and none carried 1500-7502 or 1890-9671 as its own identifiers or presented the same title as a separate record.

History and Development

The journal's own history, as it tells it, is precise. Poljarnyj vestnik was founded in 1998 and has come out with one issue per year since then. Its founding editors were Professors Erik Egeberg and Lennart Lönngren of the University of Tromsø. From 2003, Professors Erik Egeberg and Tore Nesset were the editors. Since 2007 the journal has been published electronically only — a date that explains why the print ISSN survives as an identifier and as the linking ISSN even though the current journal is an online publication. Since 2014 it has been an international peer-reviewed journal of Slavic studies published under the auspices of the Norwegian Association of Slavists. The editors from 2013 to 2022 were Professors Tore Nesset in Tromsø and Ingunn Lunde in Bergen. The About page names Professor Tore Nesset of UiT as the current editor in its narrative, and adds that from 2025 Professor Andrei Rogatchevski of UiT joined Professor Nesset as editor. The live Editorial Masthead page should be consulted for the exact current role titles, since it lists the editorial team in its own format and roles in small journals change with association elections.

Two structural facts govern that history. The Norwegian Slavists' Association elects two editors at its general assembly for a period of three years; the editors solicit submissions, supervise the referee process, decide which submissions to publish and upload formatted contributions to the journal's web page, consulting the editorial board, which the editors appoint. And the legal owner of the journal is UiT The Arctic University of Norway, whose University Library provides the internet platform for management and distribution as well as technical support. Septentrio Academic Publishing, the name in the JournalsWorld publisher taxonomy, is that University Library publishing service — the About material on the Septentrio site describes it as a publishing service provided by the University Library, affiliated with the Association of European University Presses and the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association. So the taxonomy name and the journal's own publisher statement describe the same arrangement from different ends: Septentrio is the platform and service; UiT is the publisher and owner; the Norwegian Slavists' Association is the scholarly body on whose behalf the journal appears.

The journal also tells readers, in calls for papers issued over the years, that it was earlier the working papers of the University of Tromsø and was upgraded to an international peer-reviewed journal. That upgrade is dated in the review history: from 1 January 2014 all contributors have been subject to double-blind peer review, whereas earlier contributions were subject to editorial review. Authors citing very early volumes should keep that distinction in mind when they describe the journal's history, and authors submitting today should assume full double-blind review, anonymised manuscripts and referee reports, as the submissions guidance requires.

Scope: Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the Slavic World

Slavic linguistics in the journal ranges across syntax, semantics, variation, corpus and cognitive approaches — the OpenAlex topic labels for the source, which include syntax, semantics and linguistic variation, Russian literature and Bakhtin studies, and linguistics and language studies more broadly, reflect the balance of what it has actually published. Literary work includes Russian literature in its long history, with Bakhtin a recurring reference point, and cultural work includes the study of the Russian and Slavic presence in the North, Svalbard studies, and the history of Russo-Norwegian contact. Interdisciplinary submissions are explicitly encouraged, and the journal's special and thematic material shows editors willing to build an issue around a place or a problem, not only around a period or an author.

Language policy is a scope decision in itself. As a rule, Poljarnyj vestnik publishes articles in English and Russian, and DOAJ records its languages as Russian and English. Quotations in Slavic languages should appear in the text in the original, with an English translation in a footnote, and there is no need to transliterate Cyrillic text — instructions that tell a prospective author a great deal about the expected readership. This is a journal whose readers are assumed to work with Slavic-language sources at first hand. A manuscript that treats its Slavic material only in translation, or that cannot engage scholarship published in Russian and other Slavic languages, starts at a disadvantage here, however strong it may be elsewhere. Conversely, scholars working in Russian who want a peer-reviewed, open-access, internationally visible venue that will publish in Russian as well as English will find this journal unusually well matched to their needs.

Fit also has a negative side. Work on Scandinavia with no Slavic component belongs in a Scandinavian-studies journal, not here. Work on a single Slavic text or problem with no awareness of the wider Slavic field may be better placed in a national philology journal. The strongest submissions make their Slavic question explicit, place it in the relevant linguistic, literary or cultural scholarship, and — where the material allows — let the journal's northern and international vantage point do some work in the argument.

Editorial Process, Review and Author Instructions

The normal turn-around time for evaluation of manuscripts is two to three months from the date of receipt, according to the journal's About page. DOAJ records a publication time of eight weeks for the journal. Those two figures describe different things — evaluation time as the journal states it, and a directory's recorded publication time — and neither is a promise to an individual author. What an author can rely on is the documented process: submission through the online system, anonymisation for the peer-reviewed section, double-blind refereeing, and continuous publication of accepted articles rather than waiting for a complete annual volume to close.

The Author Guidelines are unusually detailed, and following them is part of being considered. All manuscripts must be submitted through the online submissions system, and new users should remember to tick the Author role when registering. Submissions need not follow a particular template at the review stage, but they should be anonymous and referee-friendly, with wide margins, page numbers at the bottom of the page, tables, figures and diagrams inside the main body of the text, and footnotes at the bottom of the relevant page. If a paper is accepted, it must then be formatted according to the journal's article template. Style follows The Chicago Manual of Style in its author-date system for bibliographic references. Transliteration should use the Library of Congress system, with scientific transliteration preferred for linguistic articles, and geographical names with common Anglicised spellings should use those spellings — Moscow and Warsaw are the journal's own examples. Linguistic examples should be numbered consecutively, DOIs for references should be provided where they exist, and the submission checklist requires the work not to be under consideration by another journal, with any conflicts of interest disclosed to the editor.

A distinctive requirement deserves emphasis, because it will shape data work from the start of a project. Authors of linguistic articles are requested to archive their data and code at TROLLing, the Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics, and the submission checklist states that, if a submission is accepted, the author agrees to deposit any dataset underlying the research — corpora and experimental data are the named examples — in a certified open data repository such as TROLLing. Slavic linguists submitting here should therefore plan data deposit as part of the publication process, not as an afterthought, and should check consent, licensing and anonymisation for their corpus or experimental material early.

On integrity, the journal states that it has used Similarity Check, a plagiarism screening service, and that from 2016 all submitted manuscripts are scanned for plagiarism. DOAJ's record likewise notes plagiarism detection. The journal also publishes an ethics and malpractice statement on its site, which authors should read alongside the submission checklist.

Indexing, Open Access and Preservation

The DOAJ record in hand, retrieved through the DOAJ search API for ISSN 1890-9671, lists the journal under its full title with publisher Septentrio Academic Publishing in Norway, institution UiT The Arctic University of Norway, keywords Slavic linguistics, Slavic literature and Slavic culture, subjects in literature (general) and in Slavic, Baltic and Albanian languages and literatures, DOI as its persistent-identifier scheme, double anonymous peer review, CC BY licensing, author copyright retention, an open-access start date of 2007, no APC and no other charges, and preservation through the PKP Preservation Network. The journal's own site adds that it is included in the PKP Private LOCKSS Network for archiving. OpenAlex also marks the source as open access and as in DOAJ, which corroborates the directory record from the citation side.

The journal's accreditation at home is stated on its own About page: it is accredited as a level 1 journal in the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers. For authors employed in Norway and in systems that recognise the Norwegian register, that level is the operative local fact, and it is the claim this profile reports. Beyond DOAJ, the Norwegian register and the archiving arrangements just described, this profile makes no further indexing claims, because no other database listing was verified from an official source in the research in hand. Scholars whose evaluation systems require Scopus or Web of Science coverage should check those services directly for the current coverage of ISSN 1890-9671 before submitting, rather than assuming coverage from the journal's open-access status.

Access terms are simple and author-friendly. The journal provides immediate open access to all its content, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, and it has no article submission charges or article processing charges. DOAJ confirms the licence as CC BY, confirms that authors retain copyright, and records a deposit policy registered with Open Policy Finder. In practical terms, a reader anywhere can read and reuse the work with attribution, and an author pays nothing to submit or to publish — a combination still uncommon enough, even among open-access humanities journals, to be worth stating plainly.

Metrics, Read Carefully

The bibliometric figures here come from the OpenAlex source record resolved in the foreground through the ISSN endpoint for 1890-9671, source S4210221386. OpenAlex counted 154 works and 123 citations for Poljarnyj vestnik, with summary statistics of h-index 5, i10-index 0 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.0. As noted in the identifier section, the h-index of 5 supersedes, on this evidence, the figure of 1 carried in the earlier template record; neither figure should be quoted without naming OpenAlex and the date of consultation, because index counts move as coverage grows.

Annual counts in the same record require careful reading. OpenAlex counted five works for 2026 and three for 2025, two for 2024, two for 2023, eight for 2022 and five for 2021 at the time of consultation, against the journal's own statement that it publishes one volume per year with articles appearing continuously. Small annual volumes are the reality of a specialist journal run by two editors on behalf of a national association, and OpenAlex's year assignment for continuously published articles can lag or shift. The counts are therefore evidence of scale — a small annual volume, not a high-throughput journal — and should not be used to audit a particular volume against its table of contents.

For interpretation: Slavic linguistics and literary studies are fields in which citation accumulates slowly, much of it in books, in Russian-language venues that international indexes cover unevenly, and over many years. A two-year mean citedness of 0.0 in a snapshot says that recent articles had not yet gathered citations in that window in OpenAlex's data; it does not say the journal is unread, unreviewed or unaccredited — its DOAJ listing, its Norwegian register level and its documented double-blind process speak to those questions directly. Authors should weigh this journal on scope fit, language fit, its open-access reach into the Slavic-studies community, and its association backing, and treat citation metrics as background, not as the decision.

Guidance for Authors

Write for the journal's actual readers. Assume a reader who reads Russian, works with Cyrillic sources without transliteration in the text, follows Chicago author-date references, and knows the Slavic field well enough to notice when a bibliography stops at English-language scholarship. Engage the Russian-language and wider Slavic-language literature on your question where it exists. Keep the submission anonymous and referee-friendly in the form the guidelines specify, and postpone template formatting until after acceptance, as the journal instructs.

Plan the data side early if your work is linguistic. The expectation that underlying datasets will be deposited in a certified open repository such as TROLLing affects how you document a corpus, clear examples and record consent while the research is being done. For literary and cultural work, the parallel discipline is quotation practice: original Slavic text in the body, English translation in a footnote, and a note where translations are your own.

Finally, use the journal's economics honestly in your planning. There is nothing to budget for submission or publication, your article will appear open access under CC BY 4.0 with your copyright retained, and it will be preserved through the PKP network. In return, expect a small journal's timetable — an evaluation measured in months, an annual volume, and editors who are also working professors elected by their association. A courteous enquiry about a special theme or a timetable is reasonable; pressure for speed is unlikely to help and sits badly with the journal's scale.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Poljarnyj Vestnik? ISSN 1500-7502 (print) and ISSN 1890-9671 (electronic), as stated by the journal and confirmed in its DOAJ record. This JournalsWorld record originally stored only the electronic ISSN.

Who publishes Poljarnyj Vestnik? UiT The Arctic University of Norway, which is the journal's legal owner, on behalf of the Norwegian Slavists' Association. It is hosted through Septentrio Academic Publishing, the University Library's publishing service, which is the publisher name carried in this site's taxonomy and in DOAJ.

When was Poljarnyj Vestnik founded, and how often does it appear? It was founded in 1998, has published electronically only since 2007, and publishes one volume per year, with articles appearing continuously as soon as they are accepted.

Is Poljarnyj Vestnik peer-reviewed? Yes. Since 1 January 2014 all contributions have been subject to double-blind peer review; earlier contributions received editorial review. DOAJ describes the process as double anonymous peer review.

Is Poljarnyj Vestnik open access, and does it charge authors? Yes, it provides immediate open access under CC BY 4.0, authors retain copyright, and the journal states that it has no submission charges or article processing charges — a position DOAJ also records.

Is Poljarnyj Vestnik listed in DOAJ? Yes. The DOAJ search-API record retrieved for ISSN 1890-9671 for this profile lists the journal under the full title Poljarnyj Vestnik: Norwegian Journal of Slavic Studies.

What languages does Poljarnyj Vestnik publish? As a rule, English and Russian. Slavic-language quotations appear in the original, with English translation in a footnote.

What are its metrics? OpenAlex (source S4210221386, resolved by ISSN for this profile) counted 154 works and 123 citations, with an h-index of 5 and an i10-index of 0. The h-index of 1 in the earlier template text is not supported by that record.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile was built from the journal's own About page on the Septentrio platform (focus and scope, publisher and ownership, editor history, founding in 1998, electronic-only publication since 2007, double-blind review from 2014, two-to-three-month evaluation, one volume per year, continuous publication, CC BY open access with no charges, both ISSNs, PKP archiving, plagiarism screening, Norwegian register level 1), from its Submissions page (online submission, anonymisation, Chicago author-date style, Library of Congress transliteration, quotation practice, TROLLing data deposit), from its Editorial Masthead page, from the DOAJ search-API record for ISSN 1890-9671 (full title, pISSN and eISSN, publisher and institution, languages, licence, copyright, charges, review type, preservation, open-access start), and from the OpenAlex source record resolved through its ISSN endpoint (identifiers, works, citations, h-index, topics and annual counts). Where a field could not be verified from such a source, it is described in this profile as not published or as could not be verified, rather than filled by inference.