The database contains data from publications of digital Russian-language media registered in the Russian Federation on the topic of maternity capital published in the period from May 10, 2006 to June 30, 2019. The database includes general data on publications on maternity capital in .csv formats (UTF-8 encoding). Full texts of publications are presented in .xml format.

A specialized request was generated for the aggregator of publications of Russian-language digital mass media public.ru. In total, the database consists of 457,888 publications of 7,665 publishing houses from 1,251 settlements located in 85 regions of Russia. The database includes information about the date and type of publication, publisher, place of publication (municipality), texts about maternity capital, and numbers of unique positive, negative, and neutral words and phrases according to the RuSentiLex2017 dictionary, as well as full texts of publications.

database, digital media, maternal (family) capital, central and municipal media, Russia, sentiment analysis

The database consists of full-text publications of digital media on the topic of maternity capital. Materials in Russian have been published in federal, regional, and local digital media. Publication period: May 10, 2006 to June 30, 2019. The database also contains a number of publications dated 2004–2005 and associated with the mention of family capital (less than 100 items).

The database consists of 457,888 publications of 7,665 publishing houses from 1,251 settlements in Russia on the territory of 85 regions. Data format: .csv, .xml (full texts).

Data access: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5740417 (Kalabikhina et al. 2021).

The file “Matkap_SMI_17_11_2021.csv” contains processed information from the extended full-text sample by years (contained in the “XML.rar” archive).

The authors used the aggregator of Russian-language digital mass media publications public.ru. The selection of publications was limited to the time period from May 10, 2006 (when Russian President Vladimir Putin first announced the maternity capital programme in his message to the Federal Assembly, as one of the mechanisms to stimulate fertility and overcome the demographic crisis, see also (Federal Law… 2006)) to June 30, 2019 (until this date, the programme allowed full uploading of media publications without losses during the period of uploading publications from August 1, 2021 to August 15, 2021).

Key words used to select articles on maternity capital were the following: matcapital, maternity capital, family capital, paternal capital. The publication had to contain at least two phrases from the request, while the distance between the phrases had to be no more than 4 sentences. This excluded publications in which the topic of maternity capital was mentioned incidentally, indirectly.

Duplicates were removed from the database. Duplicates related to publications that included a full repetition of the text of the publication itself, together with the name of the publishing house and the municipality (location) of the publishing house. Duplications (reprints) of articles in other publishing houses or in other regions were not excluded.

After lemmatization of the text (as well as after reducing the text to lower case, removing unnecessary spaces, numbers and punctuation), the unique positive, negative, and neutral words and phrases (variables) were counted according to the RuSentiLex2017 dictionary (Loukachevitch and Levchik 2016). Repetitions of tonal words (stances) were not counted.

Variables in the database are described in Table 1.

The base of full texts (in the archive file “XML.rar”) contains additional information: titles of publications, the surname and name of the author(s), the name of the region of the Russian Federation where the editorial office of the publishing house is located (the dataset contains publications from 85 regions of the Russian Federation), and some additional information.

The distribution of publications in the main dataset by year, type, region, and publisher is shown in the Fig. 1 and Tables 2–4.

The largest number of publications was observed in the period from 2015 to 2018. The rapid growth in the number of publications in the period from 2012 to 2015 is associated with an increase in the number of digital media in the Russian Federation, which was caused by the spread of high-speed Internet access across the country.

The main share of publications on the topic of maternity capital falls on the publication of Internet resources. At the same time, the total share of publications such as press release, TV programme, magazine, bulletin, and radio programme is less than 2% of all publications.

Moscow is leading by a number of publications, followed by St. Petersburg and the Sverdlovsk Region.

Among the most widespread publishers of publications on the topic of maternity capital, there are both federal, regional and local publishing houses.

Figure 1.

Number of publications included in the sample, by year. Note: The number of publications in 2006 was calculated in the period from May 10, 2006 to December 31, 2006; the number of publications in 2019 was calculated in the period from January 1, 2019 to June 30, 2019.

Changes in distributions of publications by type, region, and publisher during the period under review is shown in Fig. 2–3 and Tables 5–6.

The main growth in the number of media publications on the topic of maternity capital in 2012–2015 was due to an increase in the number of publications on Internet resources.

The increase in publications of the Internet resource type was mainly due to a decrease in the share of newspapers, which went down from 60.68% in 2006 (while the maximum was observed in 2008 — 66.78%) to 4.37% in 2019. Also, during the period under review, the share of publications by news agencies decreased: from 19.5% in 2007 to 2.9% in 2019.

Moscow shows the highest number of publications on the topic of maternity capital over the whole period (Table 5). The share of other regions often demonstrates strong volatility (for example, in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, where the share of publications in the total number of publications decreased from 4.78% in 2017 to 0.77% in 2019), but the share of each region does not exceed 5% annually.

Many publishers demonstrate zero indicators for the year (see Table 6) due to the absence of this publisher on the Internet in a given year. There has also been a major increase in the emergence of publishers on the Internet from 2012 to 2015.

Figure 2.

Change in the distribution of publications by type according to the absolute number of publications for each year. Note: The number of publications in 2006 was calculated in the period from May 10, 2006 to December 31, 2006; the number of publications in 2019 was calculated in the period from January 1, 2019 to June 30, 2019.

Figure 3.

Change in the distribution of publications by type, relative indicators for each year

The data are suitable for analyzing the publication activity of individual Russian publishers (variable “Publishing House/Information Agency”) or publishers of territorial administrative units (variable “Location (municipality) of the Publishing House” for municipalities and “Region of the Publishing House” for regions of the Russian Federation) on the topic of maternity capital. The publication activity of the regions enables analyzing the reaction of the media to events in the field of maternity capital taking place at both the federal and regional or local levels — for example, the reaction of the media to key dates related to the consideration, discussion, adoption, and publication of a draft law at the federal level (Kalabikhina et al. in press). Measuring publication activity enables assessing the mood in the region regarding the demographic event taking place at any level.

Sentiment analysis is performed for the elements of the entire database, which allows to study the sentiment of various groups of publications.

In the next versions, we plan to expand the database of media publications for other queries and topics related to fertility policy, namely, family benefits and maternity leave.

Irina Evgenievna Kalabikhina, Doctor of Sciences (Economics), Professor, Head of the Department of Population, Faculty of Economics, Scientific and Educational School "Brain, Cognitive Systems, Artificial Intelligence", Lomonosov Moscow State University, kalabikhina@econ.msu.ru

Evgeny Petrovich Banin, Candidate of Engineering Sciences, Research Engineer, Research Center “Kurchatov Institute”, Bauman Moscow State Technical University, evg.banin@gmail.com

German Andreevich Klimenko, postgraduate student, engineer at the Research Laboratory of Population Economics and Demography, Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, german89000@mail.ru

Ekaterina Kirillovna Vorobieva, graduate student, Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, ekaterina.vrb@mail.ru

Anna Dmitrievna Lameeva, graduate student, Faculty of Economics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, lameevaanna@mail.ru