Visibility and impact of research in Psychiatry for North European countries in EU, US and world contexts

An earlier publication and citation analysis of Scandinavian clinical and social medicine 1988-96 reported that in particular Sweden and Denmark loose publication and citation world shares in many medical fields. In well fare systems such observations are alarming, and follow up studies and monitoring are thus carried out in selected medical fields. One such typical field is Psychiatry. It was decided to broaden the scope of analysis also to include the Netherlands with the European Union, USA and the world as comparative baselines. The period covered is 1981-98. This paper reports the findings and their implications on research policy. As in many other scientific fields the Psychiatric research output converges with respect to the US vs. EU in publication world shares. Both Denmark and Sweden suffer from stagnation in absolute publication numbers over the period and loose visibility dramatically in terms of world and EU shares. Finland and the Netherlands show steep growth rates. In terms of citations the picture is identical. Sweden declines dramatically its EU citation share from 13% to 6.5% during the period. The gap between EU and the US citation impact widens with USA on top. Among the analysed Northern EU countries only the Netherlands demonstrates an above-average impact. Other European players, like Belgium and Ireland, increasingly take part in psychiatric research and show much higher citation impact than the Scandinavian welfare countries.