Björn Hammarfelt

Transdisciplinary research (TDR) is increasingly promoted in current science policy. It is expected to address complex societal issues while both being democratically just and challenging deep-seated epistemological assumptions. The rising emphasis on accountability and evaluation in science has led to a growing literature on TDR evaluation over the last 15 years. Existing reviews of this literature often aim to synthesize results into general overarching evaluation frameworks. However, these reviews have paid limited attention to the normative assumptions embedded within evaluation criteria. This risks smoothing over deep-seated conflicts regarding values and goals in TDR. In this paper, we qualitatively analyse a systematically identified corpus of 58 peer-reviewed articles to uncover the underlying normative assumptions that are prominent in the TDR evaluation literature. We identify four distinct discourses: Justification, providing explanation and motivation for TDR; Integration, focusing on the epistemological dimension of TDR; Impact, aiming to better understand how TDR leads to societal effects; and Metrics, indicators of TDR effects. We argue that the dominance of the Impact discourse risks overlooking the epistemological ambitions of TDR, while the consensus-oriented Integration discourse risks smoothing over pluralism and minimizing heterodox views among participants. Both funders and evaluators of TDR must be aware of and reflect on the implications of their normative assumptions for the specific contexts in which they operate. Our results can serve as a conceptual tool that helps navigate the complexities and assumptions of TDR evaluation.

Introduction. This paper analyses the presence of the journal Information Research in traditional citation databases, such as Web of Science, as well as in new open sources like OpenAlex; and services tracking policy and technological impact, such as SciVal and Overton. Method. We analyse the visibility of the journal across sources. With the limitations of representation in the different sources we proceed to study the impact of the journal in the scholarly community, as well as in society, by looking at how Information Research papers are situated in the scholarly world and how they are cited in patents and policy papers. Finally, we look at the openness of the journal as seen through the data sources. Results. Our results show that Information Research has made quite a journey. It has found a place in the scholarly universe: authors from institutions from around the world publish there and other prestigious journals cite the content. The content coverage in the perused data sources could be improved, as can metadata, for example markup of article types. Conclusions. Whilst the journal has been openly available on the Internet throughout its history, this is not well reflected in the data sources. This is something that the new home, Publicera.kb.se, might help with. Larger platforms can help individual journals fulfil the data standards needed to be properly indexed in the large data sources.

Traditionally, the bibliometric community has relied heavily on secondary data sources, most prominently the Science Citation Index. By analyzing three key journals, we detected trends in the data sources used over a 45‐year period (1978–2022). The historical analysis of data sources reveals a consistency in the materials used as well as bursts of new materials and approaches. On a larger scale, the pattern is stable with Web of Science and Scopus dominating, but this might be about to change. The complexity of the research performed in bibliometrics does not seem to increase as a vast majority of studies use one or two types of data sources despite the increasing availability of data. A more detailed analysis detects trends in the use of data, as represented by patent analyses in the 1980s, webometrics in the late 1990s, and altmetrics in the 2010s. Overall, the paper provides an analytical overview of current and historical data sources used in bibliometrics, which may guide and inspire further research. The question remaining, however, is how the current emphasis on open sources will transform the field in the future: are we entering the great wide open, or will established proprietary databases remain a dominating source?

This paper explores the evolving role of health economics within economic research and publishing over the past 30 years. Historically largely a niche field, health economics has become increasingly prominent, with the share of health economics papers in top journals growing significantly. We aim to identify the factors behind this rise, examining how health economics contributes to the broader economic knowledge base and the roles distinct subfields play. Using a combination of bibliometric methods and natural language processing, we classify abstracts to define health economics. Our findings suggest that the mainstreaming of health economics is driven by innovative, high-quality research, with notable cyclicality in quality ratings that highlights the emergence and impact of distinct subfields within the discipline.

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 20^th 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.

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.

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.

This chapter explores indirect, text-based knowledge brokering through a study of Swedish governmental reports, known asStatens 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.

Recent years have seen a rise in awareness around “responsible metrics” and calls for research assessment reforms internationally. Yet within the field of quantitative science studies and in research policy contexts, concerns about the limitations of evaluative bibliometrics are almost as old as the tools themselves. Given that many of the concerns articulated in recent reform movements go back decades, why has momentum for change grown only in the past 10 years? In this paper, we draw on analytical insights from the sociology of social movements on collective action frames to chart the emergence, development, and expansion of “responsible metrics” as a professional reform movement. Through reviewing important texts that have shaped reform efforts, we argue that hitherto, three framings have underpinned the responsible metrics reform agenda: the metrics skepticism framing, the professional-expert framing, and the reflexivity framing. We suggest that although these three framings have coexisted within the responsible metrics movement to date, cohabitation between these framings may not last indefinitely, especially as the responsible metrics movement extends into wider research assessment reform movements.