Stefan Helgesson: “A skewed account of Swedish research”

A few weeks ago, the Swedish Research Council (VR) published their latest research barometer. This overview is compiled every other year and contains a large amount of valuable information, but this time, the deans of humanities in Sweden were taken aback by the following statement on page 81:

“In this edition of the Research Barometer we have chosen to exclude the humanities from most of the diagrams and figures, especially those containing citation statistics. The reason for this is the low coverage and low citation levels in the database. An important factor behind the low citation level is that even when a publication is included, only citations in other publications in the database count.” (My translation.)

The database referred to here is Web of Science, which is known not to cover the humanities particularly well – and yet, the humanities were included in the 2023 research barometer. Then it was claimed that “the coverage of the humanities and social sciences has […] improved [..] since the Swedish Research Council expanded its publication data by way of the Emerging Sources Citation Index” (72). The results in that barometer demonstrated how Sweden-based research in the humanities had an exceptional international impact, better than just about all other disciplinary fields. And now: exclusion.

In a letter to VR’s general secretary for humanities and social sciences, Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson, we deans of the humanities in Sweden noted that this year’s barometer offer a skewed account of Swedish research. In his response, Oscarsson explained that VR’s bibliometrists found themselves unable to take responsibility for the currently available, and unreliable, information on the humanities. This shows “the need for further statistical data and new approaches to the measurement of international impact that does justice to the full range of Swedish research”.

All well and good, but the response raises further questions about the bibliometric method as such. In the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), supported by SU, The Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (SUHF) and VR itself, we see a different ambition instead to develop more qualitative forms of assessment.

Bibliometry is essentially based on the model of the natural sciences, where publication patterns differ considerably from many, but not all, disciplines in the humanities. Much of what is published in, for example, linguistics and archaeology is in tune with citation practices in many natural science disciplines. But more than anything else, the field of the humanities is characterised by its breadth and diversity. One sometimes hears the term “bibliodiversity”, which is precisely what the humanities, but also law and social sciences, cultivate.

In analogy with biological ecosystems, diversity ought to be nurtured as a value of its own in the research ecosystem. The more forms of publication, the better: monographs, essays, peer-review articles, blog posts, and so on. The reason for this is that advances in knowledge can be either hierarchical – new knowledge overwrites earlier knowledge – or cumulative and recursive, where an ongoing, extended dialogue with the past is key. Let’s hope that the “new approaches” announced by VR will be able to represent such qualitative diversity in the future. This would chime with the stated intention behind CoARA.

This text is written by Stefan Helgesson, Deputy Vice President. It appears in the section ”Words from the University’s senior management team”, where the management take turns to write about topical issues. The section appears in News for staff.