This article provides an overview of national bibliographic databases that include data on research output within social sciences and humanities (SSH) in Europe. We focus on the comprehensiveness of the database content. Compared to the data from commercial databases such as Web of Science and Scopus, data from national bibliographic databases (e.g. Flemish Academic Bibliographic Database for the SSH (VABB-SHW) in Belgium, Current Research Information System in Norway (CRISTIN)) are more comprehensive and may, therefore, be better fit for bibliometric analyses. Acknowledging this, several countries within Europe maintain national bibliographic databases; detailed and comparative information about their content, however, has been limited. In autumn 2016, we launched a survey to acquire an overview of national bibliographic databases for SSH in Europe and Israel. Surveying 41 countries (responses received from 39 countries), we identified 21 national bibliographic databases for SSH. Further, we acquired a more detailed description of 13 databases, with a focus on their comprehensiveness. Findings indicate that even though the content of national bibliographic databases is diverse, it is possible to delineate a subset that is similar across databases. At the same time, it is apparent that differences in national bibliographic databases are often bound to differences in country-specific arrangements. Considering this, we highlight implications to bibliometric analyses based on data from national bibliographic databases and outline several aspects that may be taken into account in the development of existing national bibliographic databases for SSH or the design of new ones.

The use of bibliometric indicators on individual and national levels has gathered considerable interest in recent years, but the application of bibliometric models for allocating resources at the institutional level has so far gathered less attention. This article studies the implementation of bibliometric measures for allocating resources at Swedish universities. Several models and indicators based on publications, citations, and research grants are identified. The design of performance-based resource allocation across major universities is then analysed using a framework from the field of evaluation studies. The practical implementation, the incentives as well as the ‘ethics’ of models and indicators, are scrutinized in order to provide a theoretically informed assessment of evaluation systems. It is evident that the requirements, goals, possible consequences, and the costs of evaluation are scarcely discussed before these systems are implemented. We find that allocation models are implemented in response to a general trend of assessment across all types of activities and organizations, but the actual design of evaluation systems is dependent on size, orientation, and the overall organization of the institution in question.

Purpose: – The purpose of this paper is to investigate concepts that are used in depicting future visions of society, as afforded by technology, to map the extent of their use, examine the level of their dominance in different research areas and geographic boundaries, identify potential overlaps, analyse their longitudinal growth, and examine whether any of the identified concepts has assumed an overarching position.Design/methodology/approach: – In total, 14 concepts, each of which is used to depict visions of future information infrastructures, were identified. More than 20,000 scholarly documents related to 11 of these concepts (those with 20 or more documents) are analysed by various qualitative/quantitative methods.Findings: – The concepts most referred to aresemantic webandubiquitous computing(all years), andinternet of things(Year 2013). Publications on some newer concepts (e.g.digital living,real world internet) are minimal. There are variations in the extent of use and preferred concepts based on geographic and disciplinary boundaries. The overlap in the use of these terms is minimal and none of these terms has assumed an overarching umbrella position.Research limitations/implications: – This study is limited to scholarly publications; it would be relevant to also study the pattern of usage in governmental communications and policy documents.Social implications: – By mapping multiplicity of concepts and the dispersion of discussions, the authors highlight the need for, and facilitate, a broader discussion of related social and societal implications.Originality/value: – This paper is the first to present a collective of these related concepts and map the pattern of their occurrence and growth.

The overall scope of this study is an attempt at a methodological framework for matching publication lists at the national level against a combined set of blacklists for questionable publishing. Using the total verified set of publications from Swedish Higher Education Institutions (HEI) as a case, we examined the number, distribution, and proportion of publishing in questionable journals at the national level. Journal publication data was extracted from the national SwePub database and matched against three curated blacklists of questionable publishing. For the period 2012–2017, we identified 1,743 published papers in blacklisted journals, equal to an average of 0.5–0.9% of the total publications from Swedish HEIs. There was high variability between different HEI categories, with more established universities at the lower end of the spectrum, while university colleges and new universities had a much higher proportion (∼2%). There was a general decreasing trend during the study period (ρ = 0.83) for all categories of HEIs. The study presents a methodology to identify questionable publishing in academia that could be applied to other countries with similar infrastructure. Thus, it could serve as a starting point for the development of a general framework for cross-national quantitative estimation of questionable publishing.