Language: Russian with a preface and 27-page introduction in English
The authors used Conspectus of ornithological fauna of Russia and adjacent territories (Stepanyan, 2003) as the most recent complete list that should form the basis of their work. In their preparations they adopted these guidelines: firstly, they selected and analyzed USSR faunistic reports that for whatever reasons had been excluded from consideration in the past – most such reports were fairly recent, but much value lay in some older reports; secondly, they performed a literature meta-analysis and carried out a wide search of the available collections to enable them to judge the taxonomical position of contested species; thirdly, they updated the scientific nomenclature including genus, species and subspecies scientific (mostly Latin-based) names, author names and the years of observations and fourthly, they corrected the common Russian names of species of birds found in Russia and the neighbouring territories.