Is there a Scandinavian psychology? A bibliometric note on the publication profiles of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden

Abstract

This note presents a quantitative bibliometric analysis based on information obtained from the PsycINFO database concerning publication patterns in different subfields of Scandinavian psychology for the years 1984 to 1997. A cluster analysis shows that the publication profiles of the Scandinavian countries are more similar to each other than to both the profile of the USA and a norm profile based on all countries except the USA and Scandinavia. The main differences are that the relative proportions of articles dealing with psychological disorders are higher and the relative proportions of articles dealing with educational psychology are lower for Scandinavia than for the rest of the world. Within the Scandinavian countries, Finland and Sweden form one cluster with higher relative proportions of psychophysiological articles, and Denmark and Norway form one cluster with higher relative proportions of articles dealing with psychological disorders.