In this working paper, we have used national publication databases in the Nordic countries to compare research in social sciences and the humanities in the higher education institutions. The findings are based on a data material that does not meet the same standards as the data used in the new NordForsk report Comparing Research at Nordic Higher Education Institutions – Covering the years 1999-2014, where Nordic higher education institutions are compared based on publication data from Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. The results documented in this short report, are of an exploratory nature, and should be interpreted and cited as such as well.

The purpose of this study has been to explore the possibility of comparing publishing in the Nordic countries within social sciences and the humanities using existing national data. It is our opinion that these databases do not meet the necessary requirements for unification or reliability. For a potential study in the future, we recommend that a larger project use this report as a pilot study and perform similar analysis (and many more not performed here) after a complete standardisation and verification of the five Nordic countries’ data sets. That would enable NordForsk and the Nordic community of higher education institutions to get a more accurate picture of Nordic differences in these two fields, which is not possible today due to their inadequate coverage in the Web of Science.

The overall conclusion of this report is that there are too many data limitations to make reliable cross-country comparisons of publishing in social sciences and the humanities in the Nordic countries. The results presented in this report should therefore not be cited as official documentation of Nordic publishing in these fields, but rather as a pilot study using an inadequate data set.