One way to dignify academic recognition and visibility for theresearcher and the higher education institutions (HEIs) is throughthe award of the Docent title, lending its holder the right toindependently conduct research and supervise doctoral students.The Docent (associate professor) title is an important step in theacademic career in several countries, yet there are - at least inSweden - no national guidelines for Docent evaluation. Instead atthe faculty level, each HEI has its own regulations andguidelines. Based on guidelines for docent promotion, wedeveloped a taxonomy of evaluation criteria, identifying authorposition, specimen, publication channel, impact, and volume asimportant factors in the assessment of publication merits(Joelsson, Nelhans & Helgesson, 2020). The assessment ofmerits for the Docent title generally includes the applicants’research, teaching, and third stream activities, where the researchdimension is awarded the highest merit value. In this research,we contribute to the understanding of the national tradition ofevaluation criteria for the docent title by focusing on differentdisciplinary domains on the one hand, and different types ofHEIs, on the other. A comparison between broad-based(comprehensive) established universities, specialised universities,new universities, and university colleges will be performed. 74guidelines from Swedish higher education institutions werecollected and subjected to qualitative data analysis with the aid ofthe computer software ATLAS.ti.