The growth and development of Nordic regional science research 1982–2022: bibliometric evidence from thirteen regional science journals

Abstract In a paper published in 2020, Philip McCann gives a qualitative overview of “the Nordic contribution to regional science”, which, however, only includes contributions by Swedish regional science researchers. The purpose of this paper is to complement McCann’s overview by highlighting Nordic contributions to regional science in the period 1983–2022 through a bibliometric analysis of publications in a set of thirteen regional science journals indexed in Web of Science, using several standard bibliometric tools. Our most interesting and surprising result is that the number of “Nordic” publications in the chosen set of journals has grown more than six times faster than the total number of publications in these journals between 1983–1992 and 2013–2022. This implies that the “Nordic” regional science researchers have increased their “market share” from 1.9 to 9.1 per cent. During the same period, the share of co-authored papers increased from 50.0 to 82.9 per cent and the share of international co-authorships increased from 0 to 50.0 per cent and went from being a mainly intra-European activity to a global activity. This process is also reflected in a certain international influence on the research topics during the four periods analysed, but to a considerable extent it seems that the Nordic regional scientists have pursued their own Nordic research themes. In terms of individual research productivity, there was the expected skewed distribution with a small number of researchers with a large research output. At the institutional level, there were notable changes in the ranking of institutions in terms of number of authorships, but one institution—Umeå University—ranked among the Nordic top-2 in all four periods.