The Swedish Production of Highly Cited Papers

by Annica Black-Schaffer 8 Apr 2013 Research Policies
Published in the "Nordic News" section of Nordita News issue 1, 2013

Although Sweden is a leading scientific nation many other countries have seen greater progress during the last two decades as measured using bibliometric statistics. Several reports since the late 1990's have pointed out this pattern. This report from the Swedish Research Council aims to update the bibliometric statistics and identify potential explanations in the underlying bibliometric data. Thus, various subject fields, the degree of international collaboration, the degree of interdisciplinarity, publications in the foremost prestige journals and other aspects are scrutinised, The Swedish progress is compared with five other European countries; Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. All these, except Finland, are ranked ahead of Sweden when using several bibliometric indicators of scientific performance.

Some weak spots in the Swedish statistics are:

• A low proportion of the author­community that produce highly cited papers
• The recruitment rate of the top scientists tends to be low
• Low citation rates of Swedish national publications (i.e. where all author addresses are Swedish)
• A decreasing proportion of Swedish international collaboration is with the United States