Arctic research with the highest impact is carried out at University of Colorado Boulder, but Aarhus University is doing really well in the comparison, being the sixth most cited university among the 170 analysed research institutions carrying out Arctic research.

Arctic research publication trends were analysed in a new report which was presented at University of the Arctic (UArctic) congress in Saint Petersburg in September. The data was extracted from Scopus, a large bibliographic database covering 22.000 academic journals.

“It’s really good to see quantitative evidence of the impact of our research”, says Professor Søren Rysgaard, who has been leading Arctic Research Centre since 2012. “Our scientists are very productive, for instance, last year they published about 160 peer-reviewed articles. What is even more delighting is the emergence of papers in high-impact journals, such as Nature Geoscience”, he continues referring to the recent article about seaweed’s role in global carbon cycle.

The report “Arctic Research Publication Trends: A Pilot Study” shows that Arctic research is growing and the number of published articles is increasing. The largest disciplines of Arctic research are earth sciences and biology, together covering about 40% of Arctic scientific publications. However, medicine and social sciences are emerging fields, and their share of the total publication output has grown faster than the other disciplines during the past couple of years.

The countries with largest Arctic research output are USA, Russia, Canada, UK and Norway, but more than 30% of the analysed publications involved international collaboration.

The report was produced by UArctic Science & Research Analytics task force. UArctic was created by the Arctic Council as a decentralized higher education institution. Today, the network consists of over 170 universities and higher education institutions located mainly in Arctic countries.