The role of bibliometrics in evaluation and funding in Sweden
During the last few years bibliometrics has come to the fore Sweden. Typical signs are: university and research councils are employing bibliometricians, paper and citation counting are used to allocate research funds within universities, and recent science policy investigations suggest that bibliometric indicators could be used to allocate funds among universities, bibliometric methods are used to identify strong research groups as well as young promising researchers, and there is an increasing demand for bibliometric courses. However, there is not consensus enough on how to construct a bibliometric model to allocate funds among universities in Sweden. What shall be counted? How to compare publications and citations between different actors with different research profiles? On the other hand, there is not very well discussed what the allocation effects will be if a bibliometric system would be implemented. Using data from my own university the allocation effects are relatively small and will hardly contribute to a the profiling of research. Still, bibliometric evaluation might stimulate international publication, which is a good thing in itself.
Curriculum vitae
Olle Persson, born in 1949. His main line of research is Scholarly Communication among Scientists and Engineers. He is professor in Library and Information Science and the founder of the Inforsk research group. He is Research School Director for NORSLIS, a Nordic research school in library & information science. He is also head of the sociology department. During the last fifteen years he has specialised in the field of science studies and has a leading role in the development of bibliometric research techniques.