NBW2023_Assessing the research competitiveness of Nordic countries

This work assesses the world scientific standing of the Nordic countries, overall and in 222 subject categories (SCs), in the 2015-2019 period, along four dimensions: i) the contribution to global scientific advancement; ii) the researchers’ productivity; iii) the scientific specialization indexes; and iv) the efficiency in resource allocation across fields. The analyses concern individual-level data, thanks to an unsupervised author name disambiguation algorithm applied to Web of Science data. We classify each researcher in the prevalent SC of their publications and, differently from previous literature, we use SC-normalized impact-to-input indicators, thus avoiding distortions due to different intensities of publication across SCs. The five Nordic countries account for 3.03% of disambiguated world authors, and 3.29% of global scientific advancement in the time window considered. The contribution of each Nordic country to scientific advancement reflects the research size of each, but the impact-to-input ratios vary across countries due to different labour productivity. Among 100 countries with at least 500 researchers, Denmark ranks 4 by productivity at the overall level, followed by Sweden (16), Finland (24), Norway (25) e Iceland (29). Denmark shows the highest specialization indexes in “Physiology” and “Public Administration”; Sweden and Iceland in “Women’s Studies” and, respectively, “Nursing” and “Ethnic Studies“; Norway in “Engineering, Petroleum” and “Engineering, Ocean”; Finland in “Materials Science, Paper & Wood” and “Regional & Urban Planning”. Denmark presents the least dispersion in terms of specialization indexes and appears to invest more in the SCs where it excels (highest fund allocation efficiency), while the opposite is true for Iceland.