Toward the Sustainable Development of Russian Regions

The paper provides a comprehensive review of empirical research on the sustainability of development of Russian regions. Methods of bibliometric analysis are used to achieve the set task. Samples of publications for substantive analysis are constructed using the leading academic databases: Scientific electronic library eLIBRARY.ru and its project Russian Science Citation Index (RSCI), Scopus, Web of Science. The results of the study show that despite the increasing public and political attention to the problems of sustainability, ecologization of the economy, improving the well-being of the population, there are few high-quality scientific studies that make a significant contribution to the analysis of sustainability of the Russian regions. Most of the research is of a staged or descriptive nature, and there are very few quantitative studies that are in such high demand on the modern international scientific market. For example, assessments of sustainability levels have covered only a small part of Russian regions over a very short period not exceeding five years on average, and using a very narrow range of tools. This is clearly insufficient for use as alternatives to traditional macroeconomic measures of well-being of territories, which significantly narrows the demand for these results in practice. The shortage of publications on the topic of sustainability of Russian regions can be perceived as a direction for the development of relevant research, opening new directions and even creating new teams