One in four humanities academics have not published

There are pockets of excellence but no groups or institutions reached the highest levels of international performance and more than one in four research staff have not published, according to the first critical evaluation in three decades of Norwegian research and higher education in the humanities.

State Secretary at the Ministry of Education and Research Bjørn Haugstad said: “It is a great challenge that so many tenured researchers with research time as a part of their work contract do not publish.

“We expect that the higher education institutions will address this issue, which is a part of their autonomy and responsibility.”

Professor Shearer West, chair of the evaluation committee, pointed out evidence of positive trends found by the evaluation team.

“Humanities in Norway is well funded and is of high international level in several fields,” she said at the launch of the report. “It has been a positive development over the past decade, in particular with regard to publications, the number of PhD candidates, in quality, productivity, internationalisation and the strenghtening of the quality in research groups. There are research groups of high quality and some of these are world leading.”

The evaluation was carried out on behalf of the Research Council of Norway by eight field panels comprising international peers, each of which evaluated one or more disciplines.

Their reports are published in separate volumes: Panel 1 Aesthetic Studies; Panel 2 Nordic Languages and Linguistics; Panel 3 Nordic and Comparative Literature; Panel 4 Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Area Studies; Panel 5 Archaeology, History and Cultural Studies; Panel 6 Philosophy and Studies in Science and Technology; Panel 7 Religion and Theology; and Panel 8 Media Studies.

Some 3,100 academics are working in the humanities in Norway, the equivalent of 1,300 full-time staff. The cost is NOK1.8 billion (US$215 million) or 11% of the total Research Council of Norway budget.

Women counted for 58% of post-doc positions in 2011, falling to 48% in 2015, but the share of professors who are women grew from 24% in 2005 to 33% in 2015. Some 27,000 students are studying in the humanities fields.

A principal committee – chaired by Shearer West of the University of Sheffield in the UK, with Erik Arnold of the Technopolis Group as secretary, and the eight panel chairs as members – has produced a synthesis report with recommendations for the higher education institutions, the Research Council of Norway and the government.

Both the synthesis report and the eight panel reports are published in English.

In total around 60 distinguished international academics participated in the eight evaluation panels.

Some 2,300 researchers took part in the evaluation, from across 36 organisations: nine faculties within universities, five university museums, 18 other higher education institutions, and four research institutes.

The evaluation found that the humanities account for 16.8% of the national publication output in Norway. While there was a 7.8% increase in publication points for the humanities in general between 2011 and 2015, there was 22% growth in aesthetic studies, 23% in media studies and 16% in Nordic and comparative literature. Modern and classical languages, literatures and area studies show a 10% decline.

There are complex reasons for these changes, including a growth in the number of staff in some areas (for example, media studies) and a decline in other areas.

Twenty-six per cent of researchers had no publication points at all, which indicates that research cultures are as yet undeveloped in a number of humanities faculties. Only 35% of these non-publishing research staff are PhD students.

In the executive summary the main conclusion is that the humanities are well resourced.

“The panels found that there were pockets of excellence in most areas of the humanities, but that no groups or institutions reached the highest levels of international performance.”

“Research groups across all areas nonetheless show evidence of high quality, with a number of especially high-performing and internationally competitive groups. Detailed appraisals of research groups that have, or have the potential to achieve, international standing can be found in the individual panel reports.

“Research groups were significantly more international and original than other parts of the community.”

Concentration in four univerities

The concentration of humanities research primarily at four universities – Oslo, Bergen, Tromsø and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology – has some value in terms of critical mass, but leaves a variety of other institutions struggling to compete. The University of Oslo and the University of Bergen together account for 43% of the total publication points for the humanities in Norway.

The range of institutions in Norway creates a clear research hierarchy between high-performing research universities, university colleges and small specialist institutions.

State Secretary Haugstad said he had expected the great discrepancy found between the old and the new universities with regard to productivity and quality of humanities research and that some of this could be explained from the different resources they had.

Professor Ole Petter Ottersen, rector of the University of Oslo, wrote on his blog-page: “This report points in the same direction as other assessments lately.

“If we are going to succeed on the international research front, we have to make more transparent priorities. The rhetoric on quality has to be followed up by a real budgetary prioritisation based on quality. This is my clear message to the ministry and the government.”

John-Arne Røttingen, director general of the Research Council of Norway, told Khrono, the university magazine, that he was surprised that 26% of staff had not published at all.

“This is an unfortunate number. But we have to remember the working conditions at the broad spectrum of institutions assessed – in particular that at universities 50% of academics’ time is allocated to research, while this is not the case at university colleges – so we wouldn’t expect all to manage to publish equally.

“But we do have to expect that every scientist with allocated time to research must publish. This is the way researchers can bring their research out and hence come into contact with other researchers,” Røttingen said.