This paper pays homage to Professor Börje Johansson’s scientific contributions in general and to the field of regional science particularly through a bibliometric approach, highlighting his publishing and citation record, co-authors and co-editors, as well as his theoretical inspirators, fellow researchers and often cited researchers. 

In the aftermath of the Second World War, effective handling of scientific information was identified as crucial for advancement and international competitiveness. Here, we study how the Soviet Union, through the founding of The All-Union Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (VINITI), developed its own grandiose system which served researchers and engineers throughout the USSR. By studying its inception, the way it was structured, and how it relates to similar grand visions of how to organise knowledge, we provide rare insights into a partly alternative history of how scientific information was organised in the latter half of the 20th century. Based on available sources in English and Russian, we consider the ideas behind this grand initiative for acquiring international literature, as well as how it was received and presented to a foreign audience. In this effort, we put particular emphasis on the first 25 years of VINITI (1952–1977) while at the same time focusing on central ideas in its organisation such as “enrichment”, “abstracting” and “pre-printing”. A key principle emerging from our analysis is how the notion of concentration becomes a fundamental principle for its operations. Overall, the activities of VINITI can today appear as both old-fashioned, bordering on the utopian, and as visionary and modern in its abandonment of journals and traditional forms of peer review. 

Academic disciplines demarcate, organise, and structure specific branches of knowledge. From a sociological perspective, they regulate reward structures and labour markets through the allocation of prestige and status. Disciplines emerged simultaneously with the modern research university and the establishment of a formalised system for scholarly communication. The establishment of modern disciplines as the principal unit for organising knowledge in academia is largely a history of formalisation, stabilisation, and bureaucratisation. The importance of disciplines as areas for knowledge generation has weakened over time, but their role in guiding how knowledge is disseminated, stabilised, and transferred remains. While many disciplines are rather stable in their organisation, they are also continuously challenged as new fields emerge, while others disappear. Their importance for how academic knowledge is conducted, taught, organised, and evaluated remains however strong, and an understanding of how disciplines function is essential for anyone aiming to study the production of academic knowledge.

Disciplines display field-specific ways of valuing research contributions, and these different ‘styles of valuation’ influence how academic careers are assessed and formed. Yet, differences in how research is evaluated are also prevalent between different levels of assessment: collegial and organizational. Consequently, we employ a multifaceted two-dimensional approach for studying styles of valuation where both horizontal (across domains) and vertical (organization levels) variations in assessment practices are examined. For this purpose, we make use of 16 faculty guidelines and 112 referee reports concerning candidates for becoming ‘docent’ (Habilitation) from four broad domains: the humanities, the social sciences, medicine and the natural sciences (including technology). By inductively identifying five broad dimensions used when assessing publication merits: (1) Attribution of work, (2) Qualities of content, (3) Publication channel, (4) Publication impact, and (5) Publication volume we can distinguish specific styles of valuation for each of our four domains. Moreover, by extending the analysis to an organizational level we detect opposing ways in which the evaluations are justified—what we call ‘disharmonic styles of valuation’. Thus, when developing insights on ‘quality understandings’—and their operationalization through styles of valuation—in academia we need to put less emphasis on their origins and rather focus on how they come to travel between and co-exist within specific evaluative contexts.

Patent systems rely on information infrastructures that enable searchers, examiners, and other specialists not only to consider legal requirements but also to gather market intelligence, competitor analysis, and other strategic business information. These resources are today considered fundamental to the assessment of a patent system's performance in terms of its reliability and legitimacy. However, this potential was constrained historically by the multiplicity of formats, languages, and time frames in which patents in different jurisdictions were published and issued. This essay traces how a secondary market for patent information materialised from a distinct commercial engagement with these peculiarities of patents as documents. In doing so, the essay explores how patent literature was abstracted, centralised, and filtered through private information providers such as Derwent Publications Ltd that began offering customised patent information products and services in the post-war decades.

This study explores how policy discourses on academic career are articulated in Swedish higher education. Discourses on academic career are often expressing meritocracy and the necessity of competition, but also include demands for flexibil-ity and global participation. Recent decades of higher education policy have also stressed the importance of gender equity, which is particularly evident in the Nordic countries. Yet, how these discourses interact and impact on contemporary ideas on academic career remains unclear. We analyse a selection of Swedish government bills to explore present policy discourses on academic career mobility, and how these discourses express and create tensions for different staff groups. The findings shows that the notion, and promotion of career mobility in Swedish higher education features tensions between career advancement, transnational mobility and work life stability. It is also clear that some scholars are defined as more career mobile and successful than others. Hence, discourses on career mobility tend to give legitimacy to already existing work divisions and hierarchies partly undermining gender equity. In conclusion, our findings show tensions and contradictions in these policies, which give base for further nuanced and critical discussions on the current conditions and possibilities in Swedish higher education and academic career.

In this article, we problematize the notion that the continuously growing use of bibliometric evaluation can be effectively explained by ‘neoliberal’ ideology. A prerequisite for our analysis is an understanding of neoliberalism as both denoting a more limited set of concrete principles for the organization of society (the narrow interpretation) or as a hegemonic ideology (the broad interpretation). This conceptual framework, as well as brief history of evaluative bibliometrics, provides an analytical framing for our approach, in which four national research evaluation systems are compared: Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. On basis of an analysis of the rationales for implementing these systems, as well as their specific design, we discuss the existence or non-existence of neoliberal motivations and rationales. Overall, we find that a relatively homogeneous academic landscape, with a high degree of centralization and government steering, appears to be a common feature for countries implementing national evaluation systems relying on bibliometrics. Such characteristics, we argue, may not be inductively understood as neoliberal but as indications of national states displaying strong political steering of its research system. Consequently, if used without further clarification, ‘neoliberalism’ is a concept too broad and diluted to be useful when analyzing the development of research evaluation and bibliometric measures in the past half a century.

We analyse how the Nordic contribution to health economics has evolved over the past three decades – in quantitative and qualitative terms. Using a dataset of publications from five prominent field journals for health economics, we combine different empirical methods to analyse the general trends in terms of number of distinct publications, topics covered, and co-authorship relationships between countries and individuals. We find that the Nordic countries are responsible for a stable share of international publications in health economics. The topics that Nordic health economists publish on are relatively similar to those most prevalent in the international community, even though health insurance is remarkably absent as a research topic in Nordic countries. In terms of links between countries and co-authors, we see that Nordic researchers are well embedded in the international community, and that the Nordic research community has moved toward less hierarchical relationships.

This chapter explores indirect, text-based knowledge brokering through a study of Swedish governmental reports, known as Statens offentliga utredningar (SOUs). To this end, we endeavor to gauge the impact of knowledge uptake in their sources as displayed in their reference lists. Because SOUs are the outcome of commissions, we seek to position this feature of Swedish policymaking culture as an overlooked yet vital enabling condition for productive science–policy interaction where scholars and their knowledge can matter. However, doing so effectively requires a better understanding of the characteristics of impactful knowledge objects and the dynamics required to make them effective. Our analysis shows that the lion’s share of the references cited in the SOUs studied can be classified as gray literature and are published in Swedish. This suggests that scholars wanting to matter in a policy context may consider other routes besides the predominating genre of the peer-reviewed journal article in an English-language journal. Further implications of these findings are discussed vis-à-vis recent conceptualizations of agency in knowledge brokering as a lens through which to view collaborative impact in the future.

Introduction. The aim of the article is to convey an overall picture of the research conducted at Swedish School of Library and Information Science (SSLIS).

Method. The documents for the analyses were found in the DiVA – a national publication registry of Swedish universities and in the international citation database Web of Science. The authors have searched DiVA for publications indexed under the Department and performed a manual review of authors’ names. Searches were made for authors’ names directly in Web of Science.

Analysis. A portrait of research production was created using descriptive statistics and more sophisticated analysis was used for 240 publications found in the Web of Science.

Results. The results present the production and cooperation patterns of SSLIS researchers, the subjects covered by them, the relations between researchers, journals and research contents.

Conclusion. Overall, SSLIS appears as a broad and dynamic environment where research follows firmly established tracks and simultaneously explores current phenomena and practices.