ReseaRch Quality assuRance foR the futuRe a ... - Lund University

Panel 4 – Languages / Philosophy
through working paper publication and at international conferences and
other events, both within the University and outside it. This amounts to
some SEK 4.000 per staff member; or to put it another way, less than 1%
of the reported research income of SEK 31 mio. It is clearly insufficient,
especially given our comments below about the importance of dissemination
at international conferences.
1.3 Research quality
Quality. A citation analysis (AHCI + SSCI + expanded SCI) was conducted
for 130+ Lund researchers in Languages listed on the respective
official home pages. Less than a handful have more than 100 citations
and two have more than 200. Linguistics and Swedish had the highest
mean citation rates, though there are wide individual differences and
some researchers in other disciplines were cited at significantly higher
than average rates. These results are not outstanding. For comparison, the
most cited Nordic linguists (languages, general linguistics and phonetics
included) have a few thousand citations and some five Swedish linguists
have more than 500 citations.
Given the operational criteria of this evaluation, we judge the research
quality as in some cases excellent but mostly very good or good. There are
a few publications with high international impact, especially in general
linguistics (including generative and cognitive linguistics), phonetics,
Nordic languages, language acquisition and Romance languages. Many
publications find their most interested readership in a predominantly
Nordic or Swedish context and are published accordingly. This said, it
must be kept in mind that the Nordic context is the primary one for
Nordic languages. Quality is not only a matter of impact, but also of
originality and innovative power. Some of the publications that we were
sent to evaluate were clearly at the leading edge of current research, excellent
in terms of innovation as well as impact, but the larger picture is one
of research that is of sound quality rather than high originality.
Productivity. There is a welcome positive trend over the past five years
for SOL as a whole in the publication rate of papers in refereed journals:
21, 22, 22, 32, 27, 35. However, as these figures also include the literature
teachers, and as the number of professors in Languages is 18 and that of
senior lecturers 30, the average productivity is at the most a modest ½
peer-reviewed journal article per senior person year. The figures for books
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