Syuzhetologiya i Syuzhetografiya

About Syuzhetologiya i Syuzhetografiya

Syuzhetologiya i Syuzhetografiya — Journal Profile

Syuzhetologiya i Syuzhetografiya (Сюжетология и сюжетография) is a Russian scholarly journal devoted to the theory of literary plot and to narratology. In international indexes its articles are also cited under the English parallel title Studies in Theory of Literary Plot and Narratology, and its digital object identifiers follow the pattern 10.25205/2410-7883 built on its print ISSN. The Journals World record behind this profile, under the slug syuzhetologiya-i-syuzhetografiya, carried ISSNs 2410-7883 and 2713-3133, a Russian Federation origin, a coverage span beginning in 2022 in the imported data, and an h-index of 2. Its publisher field, however, held only a numeric code rather than a publisher name, so this profile anchors the journal's identity to the live record's title, slug and ISSN pair, and takes the publishing facts from the sources set out below: OpenAlex and OpenAIRE both name Novosibirsk State University as the publisher, and the journal's editorial roots lie with the Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, whose imprint appears on the journal's 2013 issues and whose Literary Studies Department runs the long-running All-Russian conference series on the theory of literary plot and narratology from which much of the journal's material grows.

The two Russian words in the title name a research programme rather than a loose theme. Syuzhetologiya is the study of plot — how plots are built, how they change, and what they mean — while syuzhetografiya is the descriptive and cataloguing side of that work: the recording, comparison and classification of plots and motifs across texts, authors, periods and traditions. A journal that pairs the two is therefore not simply a venue for readings of individual works. It is a venue where a reading is expected to contribute either to a theory of how narrative is organised or to the documented map of plots and motifs on which such theories rest. That pairing, inherited from the Russian formalist and structuralist tradition in which the study of plot was a central discipline, is what distinguishes this title from general literary-studies journals in the same indexing services.

Quick facts

• Full title: Syuzhetologiya i Syuzhetografiya (Сюжетология и сюжетография)
• English parallel title used in international citations: Studies in Theory of Literary Plot and Narratology
• Print ISSN: 2410-7883
• Online ISSN: 2713-3133
• Publisher: Novosibirsk State University, Russian Federation (named as publisher by OpenAlex and OpenAIRE); editorial roots with the Institute of Philology, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk
• Country: Russian Federation
• Subject focus: Theory of literary plot, narratology, plot and motif description, Russian literature, folklore and comparative literature
• DOI pattern seen in citations: 10.25205/2410-7883, followed by year, issue and page numbers
• OpenAlex source record (S4210173671, at checking time): 266 works, of which 260 are recorded as open access; 75 citations; h-index 3; i10-index 2
• Journals World stored record (at checking time): h-index 2; a Q3 label in the imported category data
• Editor-in-chief: could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile
• Article processing charge: could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile
• DOAJ listing: could not be verified — the DOAJ search API returned no record for either ISSN at checking time, which is not by itself proof of non-listing

Identity and history

Issues of the journal were already appearing in Novosibirsk in 2013: surviving catalogue records describe Syuzhetologiya i Syuzhetografiya numbers 1 and 2 of 2013, issued by the Institute of Philology, with contents ranging across Russian literary history from the seventeenth to the twentieth century — genre comparisons between translated tales and Old Russian parables, the theoretical work of the historian G. F. Miller, Old Believer eschatological teaching, patristic influences on Ural-Siberian Old Believer literature, and new sources on the exploration of the northern Pacific. That early contents list is instructive. From the beginning, the journal treated plot as something that lives as much in chronicles, lives of saints, folklore and historical writing as in the modern novel, and its contributors moved between literary texts and the documentary record without apology.

The journal's later development is visible through its citation record. Articles from 2019 onwards are cited internationally under the English parallel title, with DOIs in the 10.25205 series registered through Novosibirsk State University. The volume sequence visible in those citations — volume 14 in 2019, volume 15 in 2020 and volume 16 in 2021, with issues numbered 1 and 2 in a year — shows a settled twice-yearly rhythm in that period and a steady broadening of material: studies of Ilf and Petrov's co-authored novels and their shared stock of plots and images, Altai myths of the creation of the earth and man compared with Russian and Buryat-Mongolian folklore, fairy-tale plots in Remizov, plot-forming motifs in the books of K. Sergienko, and archival publications from Siberian literary history, including the Irkutsk group known as the Barque of Poets. A chronicle of the eighth All-Russian conference on the theory of literary plot and narratology, held at the Institute of Philology in Novosibirsk in May 2022 and dedicated to the memory of Elena Konstantinovna Romodanovskaya, the Institute's director from 1998 to 2012, appeared in the journal the same year, underlining how closely the journal and that conference community are bound together.

OpenAlex's source record for the English parallel title, resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 2410-7883 at checking time, covers works from 2015 to 2025 and records recent annual volumes of 35 works in 2023, 27 in 2024 and 32 in 2025. Readers should treat those yearly counts as the record of one database at one moment rather than as the journal's own issue statistics, because database coverage of Russian-language humanities journals is often partial. What the record does establish is continuity: this is an active journal with a decade of internationally visible output behind its current issues, not a short-lived project title.

Scope and subjects

The journal's scope follows from its title. On the theoretical side, it publishes work on the composition and functioning of plot: exposition, complication, climax and resolution as analytical categories; the difference between story and plot in the formalist sense; motif and motifeme; chronotope; narrative levels and narrators; and the methods by which plots are compared across languages and periods. On the descriptive side, it publishes syuzhetografiya proper — documented accounts of particular plots and motifs, their variants, their migration between folklore and literature, and their archival sources. OpenAlex's topic profile for the source, at checking time, clusters its contents under Russian literature and Bakhtin studies, narrative theory and analysis, poetry analysis and criticism, folklore, mythology and literature studies, comparative and world literature, autobiographical and biographical writing, Soviet and Russian history, and modernist literature and criticism, which matches the contents visible in the citation record.

In practice, suitable manuscripts tend to fall into a few recognisable groups. There are studies of a single author or work that extract a general claim about plot from close reading, such as the analysis of how Ilf and Petrov recycled plots and images from their separate early feuilletons into their joint novels. There are comparative and folkloristic studies that follow one plot or motif — a creation myth, a fairy-tale type, a wandering hero — across traditions. There are studies of narrative in non-fictional or semi-fictional genres: chronicles, memoirs, autobiography, historical prose and journalism. And there are publications of archival material with scholarly commentary, a genre with deep roots in Russian philology, in which an unknown or forgotten text is printed and situated. Work that merely summarises a plot, or that discusses a literary text with no reference to plot, motif or narrative organisation, is outside the centre of the journal's gravity, however competent it may be.

The journal is also a natural home for scholarship on Siberian literature and on the literary history of the Russian provinces, reflecting its Novosibirsk base and the Institute of Philology's research profile. Studies of Siberian poets, regional literary associations and the archives that preserve them recur in its pages, alongside work on the central Russian canon from Pushkin and Tolstoy to Dostoevsky's contemporaries and the Soviet period. Authors outside Russia should note that the journal's conversation is conducted largely in Russian and within a Russian scholarly tradition whose key terms — syuzhet, fabula, motiv — carry precise technical meanings that do not map one-to-one onto English usage; a manuscript that engages that tradition on its own terms will be read more sympathetically than one that ignores it.

Editorial approach and peer review

The journal presents itself in the imported Journals World data as a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, and its institutional setting — a university publisher and an Academy institute's research community — places it inside the standard Russian system of editorial boards, section editors and external review used by established philological journals. The names of the current editor-in-chief and editorial board could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile, and they are therefore not stated here; authors who need them should take them from the journal's current issue or its page on the publisher's journal platform at the time of submission, since board membership in Russian journals is printed in each issue's front matter and changes between volumes.

Because the journal's community overlaps with the Novosibirsk conference series on plot theory and narratology, many contributions begin as conference papers and are developed for the journal afterwards. That route is worth knowing for authors planning a submission: the conference chronicle published in the journal shows a community of roughly fifty reporting scholars from institutions across Russia at the 2022 meeting, and participation in that conversation is the most direct way to learn the journal's expectations of evidence and terminology. None of this makes the journal a closed shop — its author base in the citation record extends well beyond Novosibirsk — but it does mean the editors can assume familiarity with a shared literature, and manuscripts are judged against it.

Metrics and indexing

Two different pictures of the journal's citation footprint are in circulation, and this profile reports both with their sources rather than blending them. The Journals World stored record, imported from Scopus-derived data, gives an h-index of 2 and a coverage span beginning in 2022, and the journal sits in the site's Q3 category label. OpenAlex, whose source record S4210173671 was resolved through the ISSN endpoint for both stored ISSNs at checking time, records 266 works, 260 of them open access, with 75 citations in total, an h-index of 3, an i10-index of 2 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.04. The two h-index values are close, as they should be for a small, specialised, largely Russian-language humanities journal whose citations accumulate slowly and often in venues that international databases index unevenly.

Those figures should be read in the right frame. Narratology and plot theory are fields in which a single article may be cited for decades in books and dissertations that citation databases capture poorly, and in which influence is measured by whether a classification or a reading becomes standard, not by rapid citation. A low two-year citedness is therefore expected and is not, by itself, evidence about quality. What authors should check before submitting is the journal's current standing in the Russian national systems that matter for their own evaluation — the Russian Science Citation Index and the national list of peer-reviewed journals in which dissertation results may be published — together with its Scopus coverage, which the stored record's coverage dates reflect. Indexing status changes, and the only safe statement is the one verified at the moment of decision; this profile therefore does not present a fixed indexing list as a permanent fact.

OpenAlex also flags the source as an open access journal, and 260 of its 266 recorded works carry an open access status there, which is consistent with the practice of Russian university and institute journals of posting full texts openly on the publisher's platform and in national repositories such as the Russian scientific electronic library. Authors should still confirm the licence and any embargo terms for their own article at submission, because the terms that apply are those in the journal's current author agreement, not those inferred from a database flag.

Fees and access

No article processing charge for this journal could be verified from the sources fetched for this profile, and no fee is stated here. Russian Academy and university journals in this field have traditionally been free to both readers and authors, funded institutionally, but tradition is not evidence for a specific title in a specific year. The correct procedure is to read the journal's current information-for-authors page before submitting and to treat any payment request received from an address that cannot be tied to the publisher or the Institute of Philology with caution, since impersonation of small humanities journals by fee-charging clone sites is a documented problem in this part of scholarly publishing.

How to submit

Submissions belong through the journal's own channel on Novosibirsk State University's journal platform or to the editorial office at the Institute of Philology in Novosibirsk, following the instructions in force at the time. Before writing, an author should do three things. First, read at least one recent issue in full — not only the articles nearest to the planned topic, but the archival publications and chronicles as well — to absorb the journal's conventions for presenting plot material, quoting texts and citing the Russian scholarly literature. Second, frame the manuscript's contribution in the journal's own terms: state plainly whether the paper advances a theoretical claim about plot or narrative, or adds documented plot or motif material to the record, or does both, and name the debate it joins. Third, prepare the bilingual apparatus that international indexing of this journal expects — an English title, abstract and keywords alongside the Russian text — to the standard the journal's recent articles display, since the English parallel title under which the journal is cited abroad is built from exactly that apparatus.

Manuscripts in Russian are the journal's norm. Authors writing in other languages should ask the editorial office whether a submission in their language can be considered before investing in a full draft, because the answer could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile and language policy in Russian humanities journals is set journal by journal. In all cases, quotations from primary texts should be given with precise references, archival material should carry its archive, fond and file identifiers, and folklore material should state where and from whom it was recorded where that is known — the descriptive half of the journal's title makes that evidentiary detail part of the scholarship, not decoration.

Similar and related journals

Authors choosing between venues for work on plot and narrative may also consider Narrative, the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, for Anglophone narrative theory; Poetics Today, for theory of literature with a strong narratological strand; Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie, for Russian literary theory and history in a broader frame; Russian Literature, for Slavic literary studies in English; Studia Litterarum, for literary history and theory from the Russian Academy's Institute of World Literature; and the Vestnik NSU philology series from the same Novosibirsk publisher, for Russian philology beyond the plot-theory specialism. The present journal's distinctive offer within that company is its concentration: nowhere else in the list is the pair of plot theory and plot description the whole reason the journal exists.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ISSN of Syuzhetologiya i Syuzhetografiya? The stored record and the OpenAlex ISSN resolution agree on 2410-7883 and 2713-3133; 2410-7883 is the ISSN embedded in the journal's DOI pattern, and OpenAlex treats it as the linking ISSN for the source.

Who publishes the journal? OpenAlex and OpenAIRE name Novosibirsk State University as publisher. The journal's editorial community is that of the Institute of Philology of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Novosibirsk, whose imprint appears on early issues and which hosts the related conference series.

What does the title mean? Syuzhetologiya is the study of literary plot; syuzhetografiya is the description and cataloguing of plots and motifs. The English parallel title used in international citations, Studies in Theory of Literary Plot and Narratology, conveys the same programme.

What are the journal's metrics? At checking time, OpenAlex recorded 266 works, 75 citations, an h-index of 3 and an i10-index of 2 for source S4210173671, while the Journals World stored record carried an h-index of 2. Both are reported here with their sources because database counts for this journal differ by coverage.

Is the journal open access? OpenAlex flags the source as open access and records 260 of 266 works as open access. The licence terms for a new article should be confirmed in the journal's current author agreement.

Does the journal charge authors? A charge could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile. Check the journal's current author information, and be cautious of any unrelated site requesting payment in the journal's name.

Is the journal listed in DOAJ? A listing could not be verified at checking time: the DOAJ search API returned no record for either ISSN, which is weak evidence only and is not presented here as proof of non-listing.

Who is the editor? The current editor-in-chief's name could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile; it is printed in each issue's front matter and should be taken from a current issue.

About this profile

This profile was researched from the journal's live Journals World record, the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint, OpenAIRE citation records naming the publisher, and catalogue and citation evidence for the journal's issues and conference community. Where a fact could not be verified from a fetched source — the editor's name, the fee position, the DOAJ position — this profile says so rather than filling the gap, and readers should re-verify time-sensitive facts such as indexing and board membership against the journal's current issue before acting on them.