Publication patterns within the Humanities and bibliometric indicators for funding allocation : Faculty of Arts, Uppsala University

The scope of this master thesis is the scientific publishing at Uppsala University's Faculty of Arts. The aim of the thesis is to investigate publication patterns and publishing strategies. To investigate how the publication patterns of the faculty is structured and what priorities and considerations the researchers have regarding scientific publishing. Furthermore, the aim is to compare these publishing strategies and publication patterns to incentives and selection principles of the bibliometric indicators in the performance based research funding systems on the national and local scale. The thesis is based on the theories of disciplinary differences developed by Richard Whitley and Tony Becher and Paul R. Trowler. These theories suggest a framework based on organizational and sociological perspectives, that offers ways to explain differences in publication patterns between different scientific fields. The study is based on two empirical studies of the faculty. A survey of the researchers publication patterns has been conducted, and publications that are registered in the local publication database has been analyzed. Results from the study show that scientific journal articles, book chapters and monographs, are the most important publishing forms and occur at all departments at the faculty. Many respondents remarked that publication patterns are changing toward more international publishing and increased article publishing in scientific journals, which corresponds with the analysis of the actual publications. Overall, the respondents rank their knowledge of the bibliometric indicators in the lower scale, while the respondents' publication strategies are in fact consistent with the incentives in the allocation models. The selection principle of the local allocation model captures a larger share of the faculty’s publications in comparison to the national allocation model. However, results from the survey shows that there are significant differences at an institutional level, in how the local bibliometric quality indicator assess the respondents' most central and most respected publishing channels. The publishing channels of the Department of Literature have the lowest correlation and the highest correlations are found among respondents from the Department of Philosophy. The study also finds a correlation between the quality indicators’ assessment of the departments’ central publishing channels and the assessment of the departments' actual publications