Publication practices in the Humanities

This paper is a case study of research publication practices at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Linnaeus University, a young, mid-sized university in the south-east of Sweden. Research output was measured from publications in the local institutional repository following the guidelines of local research policy as defined in university documentation. The data collection comprised 3,316 metadata records of publications self-registered by authors affiliated with the faculty during the period of 2010–2018. A statistical analysis of research output was conducted, focusing on preferred publication types, disciplinary specificity, level of co-authorship, and the language of the publication as registered in the local repository. The analysis focused on two main research questions: 1) how do the local research practices stand in relation to traditional publication patterns in the humanities? 2) how do the observed publication patterns relate to local university policy on publication and research evaluation? The empirical results suggest a limited correlation between publication practices and research incentives from university management, a finding that is corroborated by previous research on the scholarly character of the humanities and university policies. Overall, traditional humanities publication patterns were largely maintained throughout the period under investigation.

Bibliotek för alla?

The Swedish Library Act states that “Library activities shall be available to everyone” and other policy documents in Sweden promote the public library as a place making information and culture accessible to all. The Library Acts of Denmark, Finland and Norway include similar statements, as well as the core values of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. However, the concept of accessibility is seldom defined or discussed. During recent years, the concept of participation is widely used in the context of accessibility in cultural policies, including policies related to public libraries. Even so, this concept also lacks a clear meaning. Accessibility and participation are closely related to democracy; by making information accessible and by enabling participation libraries are considered as promoters of democracy. Thus, when the meaning of accessibility and participation changes, the understanding of democracy is affected. In this article, I explore the meaning of the concepts accessibility and participation in Swedish library policies. Eleven library policies are analyzed utilizing Arnsteins “ladder of participation” and Fraser’s critique of Habermas notion of the public sphere. The article also discusses how the notion of democracy is affected by the different meanings accessibility and participation hold in the respective policies.

Introducing society

Public libraries have a societal duty to promote the peaceful coexistence between population and are therefore involved in integration work. However, the question is whether the integration perspective is suitable for addressing current issues or if other perspectives are more adequate. To study this, I conducted a literature review of published articles on Scandinavian public libraries’ integration work, six semi-structured interviews with male asylum seekers and an email interview with the chief operations officer at three asylum reception centres in Denmark. Using a lifelong learning perspective, I was able to consider the six asylum seekers’ experiences with integration in new ways. It became evident how integration is an ambiguous concept, and how the integration process does not constitute temporary phases but rather initiates lifelong learning processes, just like the activities native Danes conducts in their efforts to handle their lives in late modernity. The lifelong learning perspective probably cannot replace the integration perspective, but it may help us understand which activities are appropriate for public libraries to engage in. The public libraries’ task is not to assimilate, but to promote new citizens’ opportunities for peaceful coexistence by facilitating people’s participation in society.

Publishing patterns in Pharmacy

Pharmacy is a multidisciplinary research field that combines natural sciences, health sciences and social sciences to study drugs and pharmaceutical preparations from multiple perspectives. The study explores publishing patterns in pharmacy via bibliometric methods, that is statistical methods applied to study scientific literature. Earlier bibliometric studies focusing on pharmacy have used data from the international citation databases Web of Science and Scopus. In most of these studies, pharmacy has been operationalized by focusing on journals categorized as pharmacy journals. This study provides a new approach to the study of publishing patterns, by using data from institutional Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), and by using pharmacy organizations as the basis of operationalization of pharmacy. It seeks to provide a more comprehensive picture of publishing patterns, since the data covers all publication types used in pharmacy and is not limited to pharmacy journals. The objective of this study is thus to explore whether the selection of databases and operationalization of the discipline affects the results concerning publishing patterns in pharmacy. The results obtained in this study are very similar to earlier studies utilizing international databases. However, the results show that pharmacy researchers also publish in national languages, and that there are several national journals amongst the core journals that are not covered by the international databases. The multidisciplinary nature of pharmacy can be seen in the wide range of journals in which pharmacy researchers publish their articles.