Swedish research in the humanities has a strong international impact
A new analysis from the Swedish Research Council shows that Sweden’s humanities research has a strong citation impact internationally. The analysis uses an alternative metric to show citation impact, and has been used to produce a supplement to the 2025 Swedish Research Barometer.
The analysis shows that Swedish research in the humanities holds its own very well internationally. In 2023, Sweden’s citation impact was twice as high as the world average.
The Swedish higher education institutions that are the biggest in the humanities, in terms of publication volume, are Stockholm, Uppsala, and Lund University as well as the University of Gothenburg.
The Swedish Research Barometer does not contain citation statistics for the humanities. This is because citation levels in the humanities are too low to generate stable calculations of the standard metric.
Transition to OpenAlex
In the new analysis, the Swedish Research Council has instead used a different metric: the proportion of publications with more than five citations. The basis for calculating the metric is the publications that are included in the Web of Science database, which accounts for only one third of Swedish publications in the humanities.
Ahead of the 2027 Swedish Research Barometer, a transition from Web of Science to OpenAIex is planned. The broader dataset in OpenAlex creates better conditions for integrating the humanities into the main citation impact analysis.
Anders Berndt
Facts about OpenAlex
OpenAlex is an open database of research publications that is free of charge. It was launched in 2022 by the organisation OurResearch.
There are currently over 470 million scholarly publications indexed in the database.