Cultures of humanities publishing: Introducing the PACE-index to understand diversity and conformity in scholarly communication

In recent years, publishing in the humanities has emerged as a topic of scholarly debate. A central concern is the extent to which the area conforms with dominant trends in scholarly communication whereby an increasing share of publications are peer review articles in international journals that are co-authored and written in English. This article contributes to this debate by presenting the PACE index as a lens through which to understand diversity and conformity in humanities publishing. Using a bibliometric approach and empirical data from the Swedish humanities, we analyze publications from the national Swepub database 2004–2023 with a view of foregrounding transitional patterns relating to Peer review (P), Article publishing (A), Co-authorship (C), and English as language of publishing (E). Four selected subject areas from the dataset were analyzed in more detail: History of Science and Ideas, Comparative Language Studies and Linguistics, General Literary studies, and Philosophy. Key findings reveal that all subject areas, like the humanities at large, have seen a general increase of PACE publications over the past two decades: from an 2% in 2004 to 13% in 2023. Yet, the four selected subject areas exhibit ample variation with regard to PACE. Linguistics and Philosophy stand out as having a comparably high share of journal articles and a high share of English language publications; Linguistics in particular demonstrates a high degree of co-authorship. On the whole, however, all selected subject areas are characterized by multiple publication types, languages of publishing and practices of quality assurance. In conclusion, we argue that concerns of diminished bibliodiversity in the Swedish humanities seem unwarranted, and that the culture of humanities publishing is prevailingly marked by diversity rather than conformity. By implication, policy-makers, funders and patrons ought to accommodate such differences in their understanding of the humanities as an area of research.