Field rankings for Sweden

	Field	Papers	Citations	Citations per paper	World average	% +/–
1	Computer sciences	3,242	21,068	6.50	3.08	+111
2	Agricultural sciences	2,119	20,593	9.72	6.10	+59
3	Environment/ecology	7,291	103,841	14.24	9.56	+49
4	Plant and animal sciences	9,323	95,220	10.21	6.83	+49
5	Chemistry	14,329	189,905	13.25	9.60	+38
6	Clinical medicine	45,038	713,5	15.84	11.66	+36
7	Pharmacology	3,221	46,064	14.30	10.83	+32
8	Mathematics	2,831	11,170	3.95	3.00	+32
9	Physics	14,265	146,475	10.	8.02	+28
10	Geosciences	4,786	51,022	10.66	8.46	+26
11	Social sciences	6,125	30,793	5.03	4.06	+24
12	Materials science	6,184	42,820	6.92	5.73	+21
13	Space science	2,109	31,593	14.98	12.99	+15
14	Biochemistry	13,119	232,236	17.70	15.76	+12
15	Microbiology	2,998	47,902	15.98	14.46	+11
16	Economics and business	2,518	14,078	5.59	5.04	+11
17	Molecular biology	5,418	142,137	26.23	23.90	+10
18	Engineering	10,197	55,760	5.47	3.92	+10
19	Neurosciences	7,144	136,0	19.04	17.56	+8
20	Psychiatry/psychology	3,288	31,588	9.61	9.72	-1
21	Immunology	4,295	68,417	15.93	19.92	-20

The data above were extracted from the Essential Science Indicators database of Thomson Reuters. The database, currently covering the period January 1999 through April 2009, surveys only journal articles (original research re­ports and review articles) indexed by Thomson Reuters. Articles are assigned to a category based on the jour­nals in which they were published and the journal-to-category field-definition scheme used by Thomson Reuters. Both articles tabulated and citation counts to those articles are for the period indicated. Sweden ranks 15th in output, 13th in citations received and 7th in citations per paper (following Switzerland, the US, Denmark, the Netherlands, Scotland and England) across the science and social science fields surveyed by Essential Science Indicators. The table above ranks fields for Sweden by relative citation impact, that is, citations per paper for Sweden in a field compared with the world’s citations per paper score in the same field. Sweden’s percentage above or below the world average is presented in the column at far right. Only in psychiatry/psychology and in immunology did Sweden’s performance, by this measure, fall below the world average. Standout areas for Sweden include computer sciences (thanks largely to several highly cited papers in bioinformatics), agricultural sciences, environment/ ecology, and plant and animal sciences.

For more on the Essential Science Indicators database, visit: http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/products/esi