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

Cultures of humanities publishing: Introducing the PACE-index to understand diversity and conformity in scholarly communication | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Article Cultures of humanities publishing: Introducing the PACE-index to understand diversity and conformity in scholarly communication Linus Salö, Mats Benner, Isak Hammar, Björn Hammarfelt, Gabor Schubert This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-7507698/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Under Review Version 1 posted 6 You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract 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. Humanities/Cultural and media studies Social science/Cultural and media studies Social science/Education Humanities/Language and linguistics Social science/Language and linguistics Humanities/Literature Figures Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Introduction Publishing practices in the humanities have been the subject of increased debate in the last decade (Ossenblok et al. 2014 ; Knöchelmann, 2023 ; Greco, 2024 ). Among other things, such debates concern the extent to which publishing in the humanities still deviates from the prevailing norm in many other fields, characterized by the dominance of peer reviewed articles in international journals, co-authored and written in English – or, whether the research area’s historically diverse approach to publishing is upheld. Recurringly, the notion – and indeed fear – seems to be that the humanities are transitioning steadily towards a monoculture of academic publishing – “biblioconformity” – shaped by predominant forms of bibliometric evaluations as well as the focus placed on Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM) in current research policy (Pardo-Guerra, 2022 ; Kulczycki, 2023 ). Yet, some recent studies suggest that the humanities are still successfully defending their time-honored practices of pluralistic publishing, thus sustaining “bibliodiversity” (Knöchelmann, 2023 ; Robinson-Garcia et al. 2024 .). If so, are the disciplines of this heterogenous, vaguely contoured and mutable field transitioning differently across geographical locations? Are they transitioning at a different pace, or even in different directions? Seeking to provide empirical basis for such ongoing scholarly discussions, the present article contributes with data from Sweden to account for “biblioconformity/bibliodiversity” in the Swedish humanities. As elsewhere, academic publishing is here permeated by a number of aspects, of which four serve as analytical lenses in the present study: 1) quality assurance practice, 2) genre of scientific dissemination, 3) work organization behind publications, 4) and language of communication. These aspects may be accounted for one by one as well as jointly. In so doing we seek to produce an account that highlights difference and diversity within a broader transitional pattern. Until now, a measure designed to lay bare patterns of biblioconformity has been lacking. We here address this gap by introducing the PACE index as a comprehensive means to gauge the degree to which four big trends – Peer review (P), Article publishing (A), Co-authorship (C), and English as language of publishing (E) – coalesce in particular research areas or disciplinary fields. From the vantage point of the abbreviation PACE, a high aggregated percentage score indicates that a high share within a given research area consist of co-authored and peer-reviewed English language articles, while a low score points to a more variegated orientation of research communication. Depending on data availability, it is possible to examine how the PACE index, be it in research areas or specific disciplines, changes over time which in turn can provide insights about the pace in specific disciplines – or the humanities as a whole – move towards or away from biblioconformity. While the PACE index may be seen as a four-glass analytical lens through which to catch sight of central aspects of scientific publishing, it also opens up for analyses of trends that pertain to the individual aspects that jointly make up the index. To showcase the PACE-index as an analytical prism, the empirical objective is to chart the publishing landscape of the Swedish humanities, tracing the extent to which bibliodiversity is upheld or retracted. Examining the aspects of PACE in four separate humanities disciplines – history of ideas, linguistics, literature studies, and philosophy – we also seek a more detailed understanding of distinctive trends in relation to disciplinary differences. Shedding light accordingly on the cultures of humanities publishing allows us to tap into a number of issues. In terms of publishing, do the humanities (still) make up a culture distinct from that of STEMM areas, or are the humanities transitioning into biblioconformity and thus a publishing culture akin to that of STEMM? Or is some other pattern evolving that prod us to re-think the idea of “two cultures” altogether? The subsequent section briefly revisits the idea of two cultures while at the same time discussing some key studies which address changes in publishing more generally, and with emphasis on the humanities more specifically. We then continue by introducing each of the four parts of PACE – peer review, journal articles, co-authorship, and English language – while pointing to some important findings in earlier attempts of studying publication cultures in the humanities. Our empirical section presents the development in humanities publishing in Sweden, both on a general level, and through a comparison between four selected fields: general literary studies, history of ideas, philosophy, and general language studies and linguistics. Our concluding section provides a critical and analytical discussion on the interpretation of our findings, while also reflecting on the usefulness of the PACE-index more generally. Cultures of publishing At the turn of the 20th century, Wilhelm Windelband introduced the distinction between nomothetic and idiographic fields to reason around the relationship between the general and the particular in different traditions of scientific thought. Nomothetic fields were depicted as being directed to the study of general lawfulness and ever-enduring forms and facts, on the basis of which general explanations are sought. Idiographic fields contrarily focus on unique content, specific facts and events, with the view of understanding the particular. Broadly perceived, physics would be an emblematic example of a nomothetic field, whereas history exemplifies an idiographic field (Windelband, 1980 [1894]). Similar accounts of cultural divides have since been occurring. C.P. Snow ( 1959 ) famously spoke of “the two cultures” in terms of literary intellectuals at one pole and physical scientists at the other, which was later interpreted as shorthand categories for the humanities and the natural sciences, respectively. Despite having been criticized for being too binary and oppositional, invisibilizing the “third culture” of the social sciences (Kagan, 2009 ), the bifurcation has lingered in debates about the value of the humanities (Krämer, 2018 ). Notably, while Snow’s concern was a knowledge divide that hampered mutual understanding, his notion of distinct cultures fed into the waging of “science wars” from the 1990s and onwards, where the humanities were depicted as an anomaly in the scientific landscape (Labinger & Collins, 2001). These accounts, including the debates they have yielded or summarized, have produced an image of inter-difference and intra-similarity. More specifically, they have contributed to portraying the humanities as fundamentally distinctive with respect to other areas of science, yet similar with respect to the subject areas that make up the area as such. This backdrop is interesting considering that concerns of today target the perils of likeness particularly with respect to cultures of publishing. At the heart of the matter is what increasingly appears as a homogenizing development in scientific production whereby output is becoming more alike in terms of publication type and language, coupled with the prevalence of certain practices of quality assurance and collaboration (Pardo-Guerra, 2022 ; Kaltenbrunner et al. 2023). Because regimes of evaluation are often believed to sustain and amplify this uniformity (Butler, 2003 ; Paasi, 2005 ; Hicks, 2012 ), a number of calls to support bibliodiversity in scholarly communication have emerged in recent years (e.g., Shearer et al. 2020 ). Initiatives such as The Leiden manifesto (Hicks et al. 2015 ), CoARA and The Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication (2019) all stress the need to build systems of research evaluation sensitive to variation, both in terms of genres and languages. Nowadays, the vast majority of all scientific works consist of peer reviewed journal articles co-authored in English. There are, however, glaring exceptions – the pattern has not generally been true for the humanities. While much that concerns the publishing practices and patterns of the humanities are yet to be discovered, it is generally known that humanities scholars publish in diversified ways compared to scholars in other fields of knowledge. Variations include the use of multiple publishing types or genres and the use of national languages (Nederhof, 2006 ; Sivertsen, 2016 ; Kulczycki et al. 2020 ; Greco, 2024 ). In turn, this makes research assessment in the humanities rather complicated (Moed et al. 2002 ; Ochsner et al. 2016 ). Predictably, concerns have been raised about the future of bibliodiversity in the humanities, perceived to be challenged by current evaluation regimes modelled on biblioconformity. What hangs in the balance, according to critics, are time-honored variation in publishing, pointing towards a decline of monographs (James, 2011 ; Le Lievre, 2019 ), English monolingualism in publishing (Carli & Ammon 2007 ; Arbuckle et al. 2024 ; Soler & Kaufhold 2025 ), and other standardizing and thus uniforming tendencies (Pardo-Guerra 2022 , Kaltenbrunner et al. 2023). In light of such heated and at times emotionally charged debates, there is a need for empirical insight and conceptual clarity. On the one hand, “the humanities” can be viewed as a cohesive unit; if so, how does its publishing practices differ from those of other areas of science? On the other, being a word in the plural, the humanities may also serve as a shorthand for a multifaceted cluster of nested subject areas, environments, and units. If so, are they united by a common idiographic orientation? Do they make up one culture or a plethora? Irrespective of diverging conceptions, to what extent are concerns about diminishing bibliodiversity in the humanities descriptively warranted? How might publishing patterns be scrutinized beyond the dichotomy of uniformity and pluralism? Responding to such questions, we believe that PACE offers purchase in that it combines a focus on the humanities at large with attempts at unravelling inter-disciplinary differences. PACE – the four aspects This section outlines the general state-of-affairs, including the broad historical development, concerning peer-review, articles, co-authorship, and English. When relevant, comments are additionally made on the situation in the Swedish humanities. Peer Review (Pace) A salient feature of scholarly work is its subjection to quality control and assurance. Notwithstanding concerns about its effectiveness, financial viability and procedures, peer review has become ingrained in current research regimes (Jubb 2016 ). As a disciplinary technique, book peer review occurred already at the end of the 17th century as authorship of academies became individualized and the need to control their content was actualized (Biagioli, 2002 ). However, as an editorial procedure, formalized peer review came into play as “organized skepticism” (Merton, 1942 ) became a lodestar of scientific culture, and is thus an invention of the second half of the twentieth century (Ziman, 2002 ; Baldwin, 2018 ). While peer review is nowadays widely recognized as the golden standard of quality assurance across most fields of research, it co-occurs with other procedures of quality check in many humanities fields, where it also arrived at a somewhat later stage (Rose, 2019 ; Verbergt & ten Hagen in press). In the humanities in Sweden, formal external peer review began attracting urgency in the first decade of the new millennium, as it was introduced based on a mix between intellectual considerations and economic incitements produced within the realm of science policy (Müller et al. in press). Articles (pAce) Publication types (or genres) reflect conventionalized understandings of appropriate formats for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge (Hicks, 2004 ). The publishing landscape of late 18th and early 19th century indeed exhibited bibliodiversity, in the sense of the scope of written genres being wide and unstandardized (Watts, 2014 ; Beckman, 2016 ). Dissertations, reviews, biographies, educational textbooks and book-length treatises co-existed with articles in the publication strategies of scholars at the time and without clearly defined scripts of value (Hammar, 2024 ). The short scientific article with claims of discovery or original contributions was initially but one part of this diversity but, especially in the natural sciences, steadily increased its importance in a diversified market sustained by learned societies and commercial printers throughout the 19th century (Csiszar, 2018 ). Since then, this particular publication type has gained popularity across a range of scientific fields, also outside the STEMM area (Bazerman, 1998 ; Kaltenbrunner et al. 2022 , Savage & Olejniczak, 2022 ). The humanities, however, seem by and large to have retained a higher degree of diversity in this regard, although increased standardization has emerged in particular regions and disciplines (Kulczycki et al. 2020 ). The importance of monographs in many humanities fields is further highlighted by their relatively high citation rate compared to book chapters or journal articles (Hammarfelt, 2011 ; Giménez-Toledo et al. 2016 ). Co-authorship (paCe) Authorship in scientific publishing reflects work organization and ways of awarding credit for the knowledge produced (Biagioli & Galison, 2003 ). Because the construction of scientific knowledge is often born out of collective thinking and work (Latour & Woolgar, 1979 ), scholarly texts commonly have more than one author. In fact, scientific co-authorship of papers occurred as early as 1665 and became established praxis in tandem with the professionalization of science in the 19th century (Beaver & Rosen, 1978 ). In our times, co-authorship has become the rule rather than the exception. The last half-century has seen an increasing dominance of teams in the production of scientific knowledge across all fields of science (Wuchty et al. 2007 , Thelwall & Maflah, 2022). At the same time, work organization and divisions of labor are known to vary between different scientific fields, running from those with a high degree of task division to those with exclusive individual control of all parts of knowledge production (Whitley, 2000 ). Disciplinary fields also differ in the extent to which they give recognition to collaboration and intellectual contribution in terms of co-authorship (Henriksen, 2018 ; see Lăzăroiu, 2020 for a critical account). The humanities stand out as a research area where solo-authorship is common practice in many disciplines, and where the share of co-authored publications is low compared with STEMM fields (Hagstrom, 1962 ; Ossenblok et al, 2014 ; Thelwall & Maflah, 2022). English (pacE) Language of publishing mirrors global power relations and the extent to which distinct sciences understand themselves as internationally or nationally embedded. Throughout history, as Gordin ( 2015 ) has shown, a significant number of languages have been used to convey scientific-like activities in publishing. The dominance of English in science came into place as an effect of the new world order during the first half of the 20th century. Ammon ( 2012 ) has established that the shift from European trilingualism, consisting of English, French and German, towards the increased dominance of English commenced between the world wars to eventually pick up in speed and intensity after WWII. This development was significantly bolstered by the U.S. investing heavily in the research industry in the post-war era (Ammon, 2001 ). Nowadays, driven by internationalization as a strategic agenda, the global scene of science in dominated by English as language of publication (O’Neil, 2018 ; Lillis & Curry, 2010 ). However, stark differences apply between countries as well as between areas of research (Kulczycki et al. 2020 ). The humanities are known to retain the use of national languages and languages other than English to a comparably high degree, even though English is becoming increasingly common there, too (Engels et al. 2012 Robinson-Garcia et al. 2024 ; Hammarfelt & de Rijcke, 2015 ). In Sweden, disciplines such as history and literary science still publish in Swedish with general audiences in mind, but the issue of Swedish as an academic language has also been an emotionally charged issue leading to public debate (Salö 2017 ; Hammar 2022 ; Malmström & Pecorari 2022 ). Methods and data A well-known challenge for scholars who venture to explore the publishing practices within the humanities is that only some of the publications that humanities scholars produce can be found in the databases Scopus and Web of Science (Nederhof, 2006 ; Ossenblok et al. 2014 ). Accordingly, to do justice to bibliodiversity, analysts are depended on there being publication databases that contain a wide variety of publication formats, and languages, and thus captures a much broader diversity than large international databases. For this study, the data was collected from the Swepub database. Hosted and operated by the Swedish National Library, this database contains bibliographic metadata of Swedish scientific publications collected from all major Swedish higher education institutions and some other Swedish research organizations. The local institution-based databases usually follow the guidelines set up by Swepub/Swedish National Library. In the case of multiple registrations at several organizations the metadata is deduplicated at Swepub. The database has relatively good coverage about Swedish research outputs beginning with the early 2000s. There are lot of different aspects of publication metadata which are stored in the local publication databases, but in this study only a smaller subset of these were analyzed: number of authors, publication type, peer-reviewed status, language, publication year and subject categories. These are obligatory fields according to the Swepub guidelines, so almost all the registered records have data about these aspects. The subject categories are defined according the current Swedish National Standard for Research Subjects (SSIF2025), which is a subject categorizing system based on the OECD’s Field of Research and Development (FORD). This standard is a three-level standard: there are six main research categories denoted with a one-digit number 1–6, which have finer-level subjects denoted with a three-digit number 1XX-6XX, and these have more detailed third-level subject which are denoted by five-digit numbers: 1XXXX-6XXXX. For example, “60301” is “Philosophy”, which is a part of the broader subject group of “603” of “Philosophy, Ethics and Religion”, which is a part of the broader research area of “6”: “Humanities and the Arts”. The outputs in Swepub database are categorized into three content types: “Peer reviewed”, “Other academic”, and “Popular science, debate”. In this study we focus on scholarly publications, defined as publications categorized as belong to the first two types; thus only “Peer reviewed”, “Other academic” publications were analyzed. Metadata for all publications between 2004 and 2023 from the Swepub database was downloaded in March 2025 via the export tool of Swepub ( https://bibliometri.swepub.kb.se ). The following subset of the data was used: scholarly publications (content type: “peer reviewed” or “other academic”) with at least one subject category at the 5-digit level. The downloadable dataset is algorithmically deduplicated by Swepub: publications appearing in several local databases are merged into one record. The deduplication process is not perfect but filters out the majority of duplicated records. Altogether the metadata for 833 633 publications were collected and analyzed in Microsoft Excel., a total of 99264 of these publications had at least one subject categories in the broader research area of “Humanities and the Arts”, i.e. at least one five-digit subject category in the form of 6XXXX. Four subject categories were analyzed in more detail from the dataset: History of Science and Ideas (60104) Comparative Language Studies and Linguistics (60201) General Literary studies (60203) Philosophy (60301) All the calculations, tables and charts were made with the help of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software. The PACE of Swedish humanities In order to establish the divergent route of humanities publishing, we start by comparing PACE in the humanities with social science and STEMM. The comparison demonstrates an overall gradual move towards a higher PACE for all three fields, although with a noticeably larger increase in STEMM where today more than 70% of all publications are co-authored, English peer reviewed journal articles. This can be seen in Fig. 1 , which shows an overview of the share PACE in the humanities as compared to the social sciences and to the STEMM areas over the past 20 years in Sweden. As shown, the increase of PACE is greatest for the social sciences, from 10% to a third of all output. For the humanities, the curve starts from an almost non-existent level in 2004 to eventually reach 13% of all publications in 2023. This increase is still significant given the epistemic and historical pattern of the area and the remaining commitment to a variety of publishing forums emphasized in the secondary literature. The humanities as an organizational construct, however, also tend to obscure different cultures within the research area. The PACE-index corroborates that the trajectory is not consistent within the humanities, and that the area in itself exhibits ample variation. Whereas some areas retain one or several of the dimensions of the PACE index, others have moved more decisively towards PACE as a normative ideal for publications. This is illustrated in Appendix Table A1, which reports on the share of English, peer review, co-authorship and articles in 13 humanities subject areas, together with a calculation of the PACE-index showing the percentage of publications combining all four aspects. Focusing on PACE specifically, it is clear that that while the humanities subject areas indeed exhibit ample variation, some stand out. The disciplines with the highest PACE index are Comparative Language Studies and Linguistics and Archaeology, where 23% of all publications are peer reviewed, co-authored journal articles in English. In comparison, the disciplines with the lowest PACE score are Studies of Specific Literatures (2%) and General Literary studies (3%) which also highlights the fact that even disciplines with a shared tradition and residing within the same institutional framework (Language and Literature) can differ greatly. An initial indication, accordingly, is that the Swedish humanities are as of yet not homogenous even within broader constellations of study. On the basis of table 1, we can quickly reject the idea of there being one culture in terms of publishing in the humanities. It is possible to discern at least one culture as in group of subjects by and large committed to bibliodiversity (i.e. General Literary studies, Religious studies, Studies of Specific literatures, and History of religions all with a PACE index of 3 or below) and another which is moving decisively in the direction of collaborative, peer-reviewed papers in English (e.g. Comparative language studies, Archaeology and Design with a PACE index of 17% or higher). In order to obtain a closer look, four subjects from table 1 were selected for further analysis: general literary studies, history of ideas, philosophy, and general language studies and linguistics. The selection was made on the basis of different types of considerations. Firstly, we sought to select subjects with a comparably high PACE index (e.g. linguistics 23%) as well as subjects with a comparably low PACE index (e.g., general literary studies 3%); with 5 and 14%, respectively, history of ideas and philosophy are placed in between. Hence, seeking maximal distribution, the selection included subjects comparably high and low also in the aspects of PACE; philosophy, for example, having the highest share of articles (45%). Secondly, we sought to create, to the extent possible, a match between subject and disciplines and departments, so as to enable other types of studies in the future. As an example, the subject history of ideas is institutionalized in Swedish academia in a way that enables studies that draw on observations and interviews at history of ideas departments in several Swedish universities. The same logic applies to departments of philosophy, linguistics, and literary studies. This selection, finally, gives a fairly broad representation of the Swedish humanities as whole, with both historical, linguistic and philosophical representation. Our focused look at the publishing patterns in the selected four fields during the past 20 years reveal a number of ways in which, and extent to which, they are transitioning towards PACE (Fig. 2 ). As shown, PACE is increasing in all four disciplinary subject areas over the period, albeit considerably more so in Comparative Language Studies and Linguistics where a “leap” is also noticeable in the last five years. Next, we will look at the individual aspects of PACE to determine to what extent individual aspects drive the overall pattern. As shown by Figs. 3 a–d, disentangling the composite PACE index in its aspects illustrates variations but also consistencies between subject areas. A clear tendency is the general uptick in peer review, also for publications in domestic outlets. In fact, the four chosen fields display less variation in this aspect of PACE. This suggests an overall acceptance of the international practice of peer review also for publications in other languages, in particular for book publications, to preserve and even resurrect these traditional forms and add to their credibility (Hammarfelt, Hammar & Franke 2022). As illustrated in Fig. 3 a, the four selected subject areas have kept an even pace in this regard over the past 20 years. Turning to articles, Fig. 3 b demonstrates that also the publication type of the research article plays out differently between the areas, with the result that different cultures of publishing emerge more clearly, with a clear-cut difference in how significant articles are the centerpiece for some, and one of many outlet forms for others. In particular, the article has developed into becoming the prevailing publication type in philosophy and linguistics, where it is now the most common type. Yet, the article does not dominate greatly in either but co-exists with publication types such as book chapters. In fact, articles amount to 38% in philosophy and 31% in linguistics, and in history of ideas and literary studies, the book chapter is the prevailing publication type (Appendix Figure A1–A4). Our third PACE aspect is co-authorship where a similar pattern emerges. While scholars in linguistics clearly have a higher propensity for collaborative publishing, the practice is more negligible in history of ideas and literary studies. It is, again, a strikingly consistent pattern over time that emerges which most likely showcases also different approaches to networking, funding and task distribution in the different fields. The level of co-authorship found in philosophy is closer (but still clearly above) to the two areas with a lower PACE score, where the increase has been substantial in the last 20 years. Lastly, we turn our attention to language of publication. The use of English as language of scholarly communication is the most striking difference between cultures of publishing within the selected subject areas, with remarkably stable differences. This again highlights salient variations in the role of communication and the perception of English as a barrier – or a necessity – to engage with the respective scientific communities. In philosophy and linguistics, the audience is primarily found among international audiences, likely spurred by topics that are not bound by national borders, whereas history of ideas and literary studies still tend to engage with subject matters that deal with Swedish history and literature, intended for a national audience – scholars and the educated general public alike – with whom communication is best done in Swedish. Notably, the diversity found among publication types (Appendix Figure A1–A4) manifests to a lesser degree in area of language of publishing. As shown in Appendix Table A2, the vast majority of all non-English publications are published in Swedish. While 33 other languages occur in the database, the numbers for each are vanishingly small, albeit it with the exception of literature studies where 5% are in German and 3,7% in French. Discussion There are numerous possible explanations of the patterns outlined, both in terms of divergence between the humanities and other scientific areas and within humanities subject areas. The fact that PACE is, by and large, lower in the humanities may reflect the area’s mission – real or perceived – of catering to national knowledge needs, maintaining academic Swedish, and keeping contacts with the general public. This situation prompts scholars to increasingly publish both according to traditional (national) and emerging (international) regimes. Notably, while housing scholars with a self-image as public intellectuals, there are no subject areas with an inexistent share of PACE publications. The same situation yields friction: given the pluralism of different co-existing publishing norms, different expectations collide in evaluation processes for appointments (Ganuza & Salö, 2023 ; Hammarfelt et al. 2024 ) as well as in other contexts of ascribing value to different forms of output amidst the increasingly complex tasks expected of universities. For example, co-authorship is sometimes viewed as something anomalous that calls for explanations. In Sweden, humanities scholars are regularly prompted to provide signed affidavits when relying on co-authored publications as basis for academic promotion or when writing a compilation thesis. Variation in PACE between humanities subject areas reflect varying intellectual inquires and the cultures developed to such ends (Becher, 1989 ). In complex ways, accordingly, the patterns co-vary with disciplinary differences relating to context-dependence, knowledge building and aspirations (Bernstein, 1999 ; Martin, 2011 ). For example, the extent to which disciplinary subject areas are nationally linked or internationally interconnected will be mirrored in language choice; yet, beyond the necessity of using internationally viable languages, catering to international research communities may also push disciplines into realms where peer reviewed journal articles prevail, and where methodological procedures that demand many authors dominate. Distinctions between overriding knowledge objectives and institutionalized types of scientific thought also have a bearing on aspects of scholarly communication such as those foregrounded in PACE. Using the division of nomothetic and idiographic fields might be useful to theoretically explain why “the humanities” cannot be understood as one monolithic culture in terms of publishing. Generalization-seeking and uniqueness-seeking orientations impact on the degree to which researchers collaborate (co-authorship), as well as on perceptions on envisioned audiences of their work (national or international) (Windelband, 1980 ). Applying this gaze to the humanities subject areas analyzed here, both philosophy and linguistics could be described as nomothetic by virtue of their aspiration to find patterns and regularities, and to rely on theoretical explanations that are applicable more generally. On their part, history of ideas and literature strive for an understanding of the particular or, as Windelband puts it, “the exhaustive portrayal of a particular, more or less protracted occurrence of a unique, temporally circumscribed reality (p. 12). Adopting Windelband’s distinction enables a view of two cultures of humanities publishing that share a commitment to scholarly communication in accordance with a pluralist endeavor that reflects the many different missions of scholar in the humanities, but with two distinctly different approaches to this variation. In one, linguistics and philosophy, PACE serves as a normative yet flexible ideal; in the other, literary studies and history of ideas, PACE is an optional complement to what is largely a historically stable pattern of individual scholarship communicated in books written in the national language. However, while more nomothetic oriented fields like linguistics and philosophy are likely to have a higher PACE-index, they may each exhibit internal polarity between nomothetic and idiographic orientations. This would suggest that each culture comprises subcultures. These considerations boil down to the question on how to parse the concept of culture. In our view, there are, pace Snow, strictly speaking not two binary cultures of publishing – one for the natural sciences and one for the humanities. The latter, and most likely the former, displays a by a myriad of co-existing cultures. Yet, this is not to say that each subject area houses its own culture; rather, the humanities exhibit a culture of publishing that is characterized by diversity; that is, multiple publication types and languages of publishing. While the index has the benefit of being able to provide a unified approximation of possible changes in publication practices, PACE should always be interpreted with the disciplinary, and national, context in mind. The aspect of language of publishing is especially sensitive to differences between countries in terms of language use. Moreover, the PACE index can only suggest the importance of different publications in the system at large, whereas both the relative weight awarded to them by scholars, the different amount of time spent on a specific publication form, or indeed the value attributed to them in different contexts of evaluation can only be estimated by investigation using other qualitative methods. Complexity resides behind each aspect of PACE. Caution thus applies to interpreting them as ready-made indicators, and they may each be investigated more deeply than we have done here. The share of English, for example, serves as a broad indicator of a given field’s international orientation but languages apart from English may also function as vehicles for transnational scientific communication. Concerning co-authorship, moreover, conventions differ when it comes to establishing contributions required to pass as legitimate author of a publication (Henriksen, 2018 ). With these caveats in mind, we believe the PACE-index can provide a fruitful lens from which to observe long-term trajectories in scholarly communication. Conclusion Introducing the PACE-index, this article has sought to provide an empirical account that speaks to the question of bibliodiversity in the humanities. Pondering where and how the publishing practices of the humanities are in transition towards biblioconformity, we have provided an overview of publishing patterns in various disciplinary subject areas, and focused particularly on four of these to give a more detailed view that also encompasses trends. What comes out of the analysis is a pattern of divergence and convergence. PACE has been on the rise in the Swedish humanities over the past couple of decades, a situation similar to that of other areas. However, the development in the humanities has gone from low to relatively low – the vast majority of all scholarly publications are not PACE. Hence, in this regard, concerns of a diminished bibliodiversity in the Swedish humanities seem unwarranted. In fact, even those areas where shares of PACE are higher – linguistics and philosophy – display a variegated approach to publishing. Peer reviewed publications are gaining traction but have not superseded those that rely on other (informal, or non-existent) procedures of quality assurance. Similarly, co-authorship and single-authorship are used interchangeably. Languages other than English are used in scientific publishing, and journal articles co-exist with other publication types. Publications in the humanities are still highly divergent and represent a wide variety of functions within the fields. Book chapters and review articles play a significant role in all fields under study, and scholars have a broad palette of publishing forums at their deployment, which showcases pluralist and eclectic forms of scholarly communication. Accordingly, while there is an upward trend of conformity, diversity marks the culture of publishing prevalent in the humanities today. Implications for research policy include basing policies on a nuanced understanding of diversity in and between areas of research. The humanities are not underdeveloped and in a slow progress towards STEMM ideals but have their logic of coalescing different aspects of scholarly communication. Policy should conceive of areas as equally relevant for scientific progress – especially given the complexity of issues that research policy addresses (security, sustainability etc.) – which calls for a design of policy instrument to accommodate such differences. Funders and patrons in the humanities, including faculties and deans, should realize that the humanities constitute a complex area with broad internal differences, and integrate these differences into a collective understanding of how the humanities contribute to the understanding of the human condition. Variation is not bad in itself but should be carefully nourished and curated to enhance mutual learning and respectful communication between different humanities subjects. If this does not happen, there is a risk that the humanities will continue to be marginalized in policy and within universities. Declarations Funding Declaration This work was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (grant number RIK23-0007). Author Contribution Conceptualization and conception of the main idea: LS. Data collection and curation: GS. Original manuscript drafting: LS. MB, IH, BH and GS reviewed and edited the manuscript, and contributed with original writing. All authors read and approved the manuscript. Acknowledgement This work was produced within the project Humanities in Transition, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (grant number RIK23-0007). The study has been presented at the WORM Exploratory Workshop on Research Metrics, Uppsala 2024, the HERO Research Seminar, Uppsala 2025, and the Humanities in Transition Workshop, Sigtuna, 2025. We are grateful for the comments received at these events. Data Availability Bibliometric data downloaded from the Swepub database that support the findings of this study have been deposited in Figshare, https://doi.org/10.17045/sthlmuni.30018595 References Ammon U (ed) (2001) The dominance of English as a language of science: Effects on other languages and language communities . De Gruyter, Berlin Ammon U (2012) Linguistic inequality and its effects on participation in scientific Discourse and on global knowledge accumulation – with a closer look at the problems of the second-rank language communities. Applied Linguistic Review 3(2):333–355 Arbuckle A, Adema J, Ortega É (2024) Editors’ gloss: The problem with monolingualism in academic knowledge production. 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2","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":48600,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eShare of PACE publications in four selected humanities subjects per year\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"2.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7507698/v1/b3e6961a50f99d2910765c02.png"},{"id":90921722,"identity":"c6e47fc3-e3b2-410b-85d2-26eac63e5aaf","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-09-09 14:56:36","extension":"png","order_by":3,"title":"Figure 3","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":47911,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003ea: Share of peer-reviewed publications (P: peer-reviewed) in four selected humanities subjects per year\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"3a.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7507698/v1/2f4b72f5fa14b85cab788a09.png"},{"id":90919856,"identity":"840dc5fc-52a5-4327-aeb3-612275574a56","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-09-09 14:40:36","extension":"png","order_by":4,"title":"Figure 4","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":55950,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eFigure 3b: Share of publications which are journal articles (A: article) in four selected humanities subjects per year\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"3b.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7507698/v1/e8a128a19cfa59e8c2a37786.png"},{"id":90919857,"identity":"8a23b465-803b-4f7c-90d3-05f8beb9b968","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-09-09 14:40:36","extension":"png","order_by":5,"title":"Figure 5","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":48649,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eFigure 3c: Share of publications which have more than one author (C: co-authored) in four selected humanities subjects per year\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"3c.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7507698/v1/a5af1336d792791b5b546604.png"},{"id":90919858,"identity":"7869d7d7-3da1-421f-ab09-730f0630de3f","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-09-09 14:40:36","extension":"png","order_by":6,"title":"Figure 6","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"figure","size":45655,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"\u003cp\u003eFigure 3d: Share of publications in English (E: English language) in four selected humanities subjects per year\u003c/p\u003e","description":"","filename":"3d.png","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7507698/v1/e926d63c4a6dcb6034e74ead.png"},{"id":90922183,"identity":"30e2d02b-5b6a-4079-a1db-e1082668535c","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-09-09 15:04:37","extension":"pdf","order_by":0,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"manuscript-pdf","size":736063,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"manuscript.pdf","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7507698/v1/efcf8419-dc33-42c3-9fa1-c60c61bc3d0b.pdf"},{"id":90919862,"identity":"2c52b4dd-7dea-41f8-8cb2-447e44747fbf","added_by":"auto","created_at":"2025-09-09 14:40:37","extension":"docx","order_by":0,"title":"","display":"","copyAsset":false,"role":"supplement","size":71884,"visible":true,"origin":"","legend":"","description":"","filename":"SUPPLEMENTARYINFORMATION.docx","url":"https://assets-eu.researchsquare.com/files/rs-7507698/v1/81457cbef8abeeafb6bab0ad.docx"}],"financialInterests":"No competing interests reported.","formattedTitle":"Cultures of humanities publishing: Introducing the PACE-index to understand diversity and conformity in scholarly communication","fulltext":[{"header":"Introduction","content":"\u003cp\u003ePublishing practices in the humanities have been the subject of increased debate in the last decade (Ossenblok et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR50\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e; Knöchelmann, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR34\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e; Greco, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR19\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e). Among other things, such debates concern the extent to which publishing in the humanities still deviates from the prevailing norm in many other fields, characterized by the dominance of peer reviewed articles in international journals, co-authored and written in English – or, whether the research area’s historically diverse approach to publishing is upheld. Recurringly, the notion – and indeed fear – seems to be that the humanities are transitioning steadily towards a monoculture of academic publishing – “biblioconformity” – shaped by predominant forms of bibliometric evaluations as well as the focus placed on Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM) in current research policy (Pardo-Guerra, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR52\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e; Kulczycki, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR36\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e). Yet, some recent studies suggest that the humanities are still successfully defending their time-honored practices of pluralistic publishing, thus sustaining “bibliodiversity” (Knöchelmann, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR34\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e; Robinson-Garcia et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR53\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e.). If so, are the disciplines of this heterogenous, vaguely contoured and mutable field transitioning differently across geographical locations? Are they transitioning at a different pace, or even in different directions?\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSeeking to provide empirical basis for such ongoing scholarly discussions, the present article contributes with data from Sweden to account for “biblioconformity/bibliodiversity” in the Swedish humanities. As elsewhere, academic publishing is here permeated by a number of aspects, of which four serve as analytical lenses in the present study: 1) quality assurance practice, 2) genre of scientific dissemination, 3) work organization behind publications, 4) and language of communication. These aspects may be accounted for one by one as well as jointly. In so doing we seek to produce an account that highlights difference and diversity within a broader transitional pattern.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUntil now, a measure designed to lay bare patterns of biblioconformity has been lacking. We here address this gap by introducing the PACE index as a comprehensive means to gauge the degree to which four big trends – Peer review (P), Article publishing (A), Co-authorship (C), and English as language of publishing (E) – coalesce in particular research areas or disciplinary fields. From the vantage point of the abbreviation PACE, a high aggregated percentage score indicates that a high share within a given research area consist of co-authored and peer-reviewed English language articles, while a low score points to a more variegated orientation of research communication. Depending on data availability, it is possible to examine how the PACE index, be it in research areas or specific disciplines, changes over time which in turn can provide insights about the pace in specific disciplines – or the humanities as a whole – move towards or away from biblioconformity.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhile the PACE index may be seen as a four-glass analytical lens through which to catch sight of central aspects of scientific publishing, it also opens up for analyses of trends that pertain to the individual aspects that jointly make up the index. To showcase the PACE-index as an analytical prism, the empirical objective is to chart the publishing landscape of the Swedish humanities, tracing the extent to which bibliodiversity is upheld or retracted. Examining the aspects of PACE in four separate humanities disciplines – history of ideas, linguistics, literature studies, and philosophy – we also seek a more detailed understanding of distinctive trends in relation to disciplinary differences.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eShedding light accordingly on the cultures of humanities publishing allows us to tap into a number of issues. In terms of publishing, do the humanities (still) make up a culture distinct from that of STEMM areas, or are the humanities transitioning into biblioconformity and thus a publishing culture akin to that of STEMM? Or is some other pattern evolving that prod us to re-think the idea of “two cultures” altogether?\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe subsequent section briefly revisits the idea of two cultures while at the same time discussing some key studies which address changes in publishing more generally, and with emphasis on the humanities more specifically. We then continue by introducing each of the four parts of PACE – peer review, journal articles, co-authorship, and English language – while pointing to some important findings in earlier attempts of studying publication cultures in the humanities. Our empirical section presents the development in humanities publishing in Sweden, both on a general level, and through a comparison between four selected fields: general literary studies, history of ideas, philosophy, and general language studies and linguistics. Our concluding section provides a critical and analytical discussion on the interpretation of our findings, while also reflecting on the usefulness of the PACE-index more generally.\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eCultures of publishing\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAt the turn of the 20th century, Wilhelm Windelband introduced the distinction between \u003cem\u003enomothetic\u003c/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eidiographic\u003c/em\u003e fields to reason around the relationship between the general and the particular in different traditions of scientific thought. Nomothetic fields were depicted as being directed to the study of general lawfulness and ever-enduring forms and facts, on the basis of which general explanations are sought. Idiographic fields contrarily focus on unique content, specific facts and events, with the view of understanding the particular. Broadly perceived, physics would be an emblematic example of a nomothetic field, whereas history exemplifies an idiographic field (Windelband, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR65\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1980\u003c/span\u003e [1894]). Similar accounts of cultural divides have since been occurring. C.P. Snow (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR60\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1959\u003c/span\u003e) famously spoke of “the two cultures” in terms of literary intellectuals at one pole and physical scientists at the other, which was later interpreted as shorthand categories for the humanities and the natural sciences, respectively. Despite having been criticized for being too binary and oppositional, invisibilizing the “third culture” of the social sciences (Kagan, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR32\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2009\u003c/span\u003e), the bifurcation has lingered in debates about the value of the humanities (Krämer, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR35\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). Notably, while Snow’s concern was a knowledge divide that hampered mutual understanding, his notion of distinct cultures fed into the waging of “science wars” from the 1990s and onwards, where the humanities were depicted as an anomaly in the scientific landscape (Labinger \u0026amp; Collins, 2001).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThese accounts, including the debates they have yielded or summarized, have produced an image of inter-difference and intra-similarity. More specifically, they have contributed to portraying the humanities as fundamentally distinctive with respect to other areas of science, yet similar with respect to the subject areas that make up the area as such. This backdrop is interesting considering that concerns of today target the perils of likeness particularly with respect to cultures of publishing.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAt the heart of the matter is what increasingly appears as a homogenizing development in scientific production whereby output is becoming more alike in terms of publication type and language, coupled with the prevalence of certain practices of quality assurance and collaboration (Pardo-Guerra, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR52\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e; Kaltenbrunner et al. 2023). Because regimes of evaluation are often believed to sustain and amplify this uniformity (Butler, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR13\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2003\u003c/span\u003e; Paasi, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR51\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2005\u003c/span\u003e; Hicks, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR28\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2012\u003c/span\u003e), a number of calls to support bibliodiversity in scholarly communication have emerged in recent years (e.g., Shearer et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR57\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). Initiatives such as The Leiden manifesto (Hicks et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR29\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e), CoARA and The Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication (2019) all stress the need to build systems of research evaluation sensitive to variation, both in terms of genres and languages.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNowadays, the vast majority of all scientific works consist of peer reviewed journal articles co-authored in English. There are, however, glaring exceptions – the pattern has not generally been true for the humanities. While much that concerns the publishing practices and patterns of the humanities are yet to be discovered, it is generally known that humanities scholars publish in diversified ways compared to scholars in other fields of knowledge. Variations include the use of multiple publishing types or genres and the use of national languages (Nederhof, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR47\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e; Sivertsen, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR58\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e; Kulczycki et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR37\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Greco, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR19\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e). In turn, this makes research assessment in the humanities rather complicated (Moed et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR45\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2002\u003c/span\u003e; Ochsner et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR48\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e). Predictably, concerns have been raised about the future of bibliodiversity in the humanities, perceived to be challenged by current evaluation regimes modelled on biblioconformity. What hangs in the balance, according to critics, are time-honored variation in publishing, pointing towards a decline of monographs (James, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR30\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e; Le Lievre, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR40\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e), English monolingualism in publishing (Carli \u0026amp; Ammon \u003cspan citationid=\"CR12\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2007\u003c/span\u003e; Arbuckle et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR3\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Soler \u0026amp; Kaufhold \u003cspan citationid=\"CR59\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e), and other standardizing and thus uniforming tendencies (Pardo-Guerra \u003cspan citationid=\"CR52\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e, Kaltenbrunner et al. 2023).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn light of such heated and at times emotionally charged debates, there is a need for empirical insight and conceptual clarity. On the one hand, “the humanities” can be viewed as a cohesive unit; if so, how does its publishing practices differ from those of other areas of science? On the other, being a word in the plural, the humanities may also serve as a shorthand for a multifaceted cluster of nested subject areas, environments, and units. If so, are they united by a common idiographic orientation? Do they make up one culture or a plethora? Irrespective of diverging conceptions, to what extent are concerns about diminishing bibliodiversity in the humanities descriptively warranted? How might publishing patterns be scrutinized beyond the dichotomy of uniformity and pluralism? Responding to such questions, we believe that PACE offers purchase in that it combines a focus on the humanities at large with attempts at unravelling inter-disciplinary differences.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cdiv id=\"Sec3\" class=\"Section2\"\u003e\u003ch2\u003ePACE – the four aspects\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis section outlines the general state-of-affairs, including the broad historical development, concerning peer-review, articles, co-authorship, and English. When relevant, comments are additionally made on the situation in the Swedish humanities.\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/div\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003ePeer Review (Pace)\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA salient feature of scholarly work is its subjection to quality control and assurance. Notwithstanding concerns about its effectiveness, financial viability and procedures, peer review has become ingrained in current research regimes (Jubb \u003cspan citationid=\"CR31\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e). As a disciplinary technique, book peer review occurred already at the end of the 17th century as authorship of academies became individualized and the need to control their content was actualized (Biagioli, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2002\u003c/span\u003e). However, as an editorial procedure, formalized peer review came into play as “organized skepticism” (Merton, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR44\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1942\u003c/span\u003e) became a lodestar of scientific culture, and is thus an invention of the second half of the twentieth century (Ziman, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR67\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2002\u003c/span\u003e; Baldwin, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR4\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). While peer review is nowadays widely recognized as the golden standard of quality assurance across most fields of research, it co-occurs with other procedures of quality check in many humanities fields, where it also arrived at a somewhat later stage (Rose, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR54\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e; Verbergt \u0026amp; ten Hagen in press). In the humanities in Sweden, formal external peer review began attracting urgency in the first decade of the new millennium, as it was introduced based on a mix between intellectual considerations and economic incitements produced within the realm of science policy (Müller et al. in press).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eArticles (pAce)\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication types (or genres) reflect conventionalized understandings of appropriate formats for the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge (Hicks, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2004\u003c/span\u003e). The publishing landscape of late 18th and early 19th century indeed exhibited bibliodiversity, in the sense of the scope of written genres being wide and unstandardized (Watts, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR62\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e; Beckman, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR8\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e). Dissertations, reviews, biographies, educational textbooks and book-length treatises co-existed with articles in the publication strategies of scholars at the time and without clearly defined scripts of value (Hammar, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR22\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e). The short scientific article with claims of discovery or original contributions was initially but one part of this diversity but, especially in the natural sciences, steadily increased its importance in a diversified market sustained by learned societies and commercial printers throughout the 19th century (Csiszar, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR14\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). Since then, this particular publication type has gained popularity across a range of scientific fields, also outside the STEMM area (Bazerman, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1998\u003c/span\u003e; Kaltenbrunner et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR33\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e, Savage \u0026amp; Olejniczak, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR56\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e). The humanities, however, seem by and large to have retained a higher degree of diversity in this regard, although increased standardization has emerged in particular regions and disciplines (Kulczycki et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR37\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). The importance of monographs in many humanities fields is further highlighted by their relatively high citation rate compared to book chapters or journal articles (Hammarfelt, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR23\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e; Giménez-Toledo et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eCo-authorship (paCe)\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAuthorship in scientific publishing reflects work organization and ways of awarding credit for the knowledge produced (Biagioli \u0026amp; Galison, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR11\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2003\u003c/span\u003e). Because the construction of scientific knowledge is often born out of collective thinking and work (Latour \u0026amp; Woolgar, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR38\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1979\u003c/span\u003e), scholarly texts commonly have more than one author. In fact, scientific co-authorship of papers occurred as early as 1665 and became established praxis in tandem with the professionalization of science in the 19th century (Beaver \u0026amp; Rosen, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR6\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1978\u003c/span\u003e). In our times, co-authorship has become the rule rather than the exception. The last half-century has seen an increasing dominance of teams in the production of scientific knowledge across all fields of science (Wuchty et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR66\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2007\u003c/span\u003e, Thelwall \u0026amp; Maflah, 2022). At the same time, work organization and divisions of labor are known to vary between different scientific fields, running from those with a high degree of task division to those with exclusive individual control of all parts of knowledge production (Whitley, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR63\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2000\u003c/span\u003e). Disciplinary fields also differ in the extent to which they give recognition to collaboration and intellectual contribution in terms of co-authorship (Henriksen, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR26\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e; see Lăzăroiu, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR39\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e for a critical account). The humanities stand out as a research area where solo-authorship is common practice in many disciplines, and where the share of co-authored publications is low compared with STEMM fields (Hagstrom, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR20\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1962\u003c/span\u003e; Ossenblok et al, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR50\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e; Thelwall \u0026amp; Maflah, 2022).\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003ch3\u003eEnglish (pacE)\u003c/h3\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLanguage of publishing mirrors global power relations and the extent to which distinct sciences understand themselves as internationally or nationally embedded. Throughout history, as Gordin (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR18\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e) has shown, a significant number of languages have been used to convey scientific-like activities in publishing. The dominance of English in science came into place as an effect of the new world order during the first half of the 20th century. Ammon (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR2\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2012\u003c/span\u003e) has established that the shift from European trilingualism, consisting of English, French and German, towards the increased dominance of English commenced between the world wars to eventually pick up in speed and intensity after WWII. This development was significantly bolstered by the U.S. investing heavily in the research industry in the post-war era (Ammon, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2001\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNowadays, driven by internationalization as a strategic agenda, the global scene of science in dominated by English as language of publication (O’Neil, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR49\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e; Lillis \u0026amp; Curry, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR41\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2010\u003c/span\u003e). However, stark differences apply between countries as well as between areas of research (Kulczycki et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR37\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). The humanities are known to retain the use of national languages and languages other than English to a comparably high degree, even though English is becoming increasingly common there, too (Engels et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2012\u003c/span\u003e Robinson-Garcia et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR53\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e; Hammarfelt \u0026amp; de Rijcke, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR24\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e). In Sweden, disciplines such as history and literary science still publish in Swedish with general audiences in mind, but the issue of Swedish as an academic language has also been an emotionally charged issue leading to public debate (Salö \u003cspan citationid=\"CR55\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e; Hammar \u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e; Malmström \u0026amp; Pecorari \u003cspan citationid=\"CR42\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2022\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Methods and data","content":"\u003cp\u003eA well-known challenge for scholars who venture to explore the publishing practices within the humanities is that only some of the publications that humanities scholars produce can be found in the databases Scopus and Web of Science (Nederhof, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR47\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e; Ossenblok et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR50\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e). Accordingly, to do justice to bibliodiversity, analysts are depended on there being publication databases that contain a wide variety of publication formats, and languages, and thus captures a much broader diversity than large international databases.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFor this study, the data was collected from the Swepub database. Hosted and operated by the Swedish National Library, this database contains bibliographic metadata of Swedish scientific publications collected from all major Swedish higher education institutions and some other Swedish research organizations. The local institution-based databases usually follow the guidelines set up by Swepub/Swedish National Library. In the case of multiple registrations at several organizations the metadata is deduplicated at Swepub. The database has relatively good coverage about Swedish research outputs beginning with the early 2000s.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThere are lot of different aspects of publication metadata which are stored in the local publication databases, but in this study only a smaller subset of these were analyzed: number of authors, publication type, peer-reviewed status, language, publication year and subject categories. These are obligatory fields according to the Swepub guidelines, so almost all the registered records have data about these aspects.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe subject categories are defined according the current Swedish National Standard for Research Subjects (SSIF2025), which is a subject categorizing system based on the OECD’s Field of Research and Development (FORD). This standard is a three-level standard: there are six main research categories denoted with a one-digit number 1–6, which have finer-level subjects denoted with a three-digit number 1XX-6XX, and these have more detailed third-level subject which are denoted by five-digit numbers: 1XXXX-6XXXX. For example, “60301” is “Philosophy”, which is a part of the broader subject group of “603” of “Philosophy, Ethics and Religion”, which is a part of the broader research area of “6”: “Humanities and the Arts”.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe outputs in Swepub database are categorized into three content types: “Peer reviewed”, “Other academic”, and “Popular science, debate”. In this study we focus on scholarly publications, defined as publications categorized as belong to the first two types; thus only “Peer reviewed”, “Other academic” publications were analyzed.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMetadata for all publications between 2004 and 2023 from the Swepub database was downloaded in March 2025 via the export tool of Swepub (\u003cspan class=\"ExternalRef\"\u003e\u003cspan class=\"RefSource\"\u003ehttps://bibliometri.swepub.kb.se\u003c/span\u003e\u003cspan address=\"https://bibliometri.swepub.kb.se\" targettype=\"URL\" class=\"RefTarget\"\u003e\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/span\u003e). The following subset of the data was used: scholarly publications (content type: “peer reviewed” or “other academic”) with at least one subject category at the 5-digit level. The downloadable dataset is algorithmically deduplicated by Swepub: publications appearing in several local databases are merged into one record. The deduplication process is not perfect but filters out the majority of duplicated records.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAltogether the metadata for 833 633 publications were collected and analyzed in Microsoft Excel., a total of 99264 of these publications had at least one subject categories in the broader research area of “Humanities and the Arts”, i.e. at least one five-digit subject category in the form of 6XXXX.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFour subject categories were analyzed in more detail from the dataset:\u003c/p\u003e\u003cul\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eHistory of Science and Ideas (60104)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eComparative Language Studies and Linguistics (60201)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003eGeneral Literary studies (60203)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cp\u003ePhilosophy (60301)\u003c/p\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/ul\u003e\u003cp\u003eAll the calculations, tables and charts were made with the help of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch3\u003eThe PACE of Swedish humanities\u003c/h3\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn order to establish the divergent route of humanities publishing, we start by comparing PACE in the humanities with social science and STEMM. The comparison demonstrates an overall gradual move towards a higher PACE for all three fields, although with a noticeably larger increase in STEMM where today more than 70% of all publications are co-authored, English peer reviewed journal articles. This can be seen in Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig1\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e1\u003c/span\u003e, which shows an overview of the share PACE in the humanities as compared to the social sciences and to the STEMM areas over the past 20 years in Sweden.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs shown, the increase of PACE is greatest for the social sciences, from 10% to a third of all output. For the humanities, the curve starts from an almost non-existent level in 2004 to eventually reach 13% of all publications in 2023. This increase is still significant given the epistemic and historical pattern of the area and the remaining commitment to a variety of publishing forums emphasized in the secondary literature.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe humanities as an organizational construct, however, also tend to obscure different cultures within the research area. The PACE-index corroborates that the trajectory is not consistent within the humanities, and that the area in itself exhibits ample variation. Whereas some areas retain one or several of the dimensions of the PACE index, others have moved more decisively towards PACE as a normative ideal for publications. This is illustrated in Appendix Table A1, which reports on the share of English, peer review, co-authorship and articles in 13 humanities subject areas, together with a calculation of the PACE-index showing the percentage of publications combining all four aspects.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFocusing on PACE specifically, it is clear that that while the humanities subject areas indeed exhibit ample variation, some stand out. The disciplines with the highest PACE index are Comparative Language Studies and Linguistics and Archaeology, where 23% of all publications are peer reviewed, co-authored journal articles in English. In comparison, the disciplines with the lowest PACE score are Studies of Specific Literatures (2%) and General Literary studies (3%) which also highlights the fact that even disciplines with a shared tradition and residing within the same institutional framework (Language and Literature) can differ greatly. An initial indication, accordingly, is that the Swedish humanities are as of yet not homogenous even within broader constellations of study. On the basis of table 1, we can quickly reject the idea of there being one culture in terms of publishing in the humanities. It is possible to discern at least one culture as in group of subjects by and large committed to bibliodiversity (i.e. General Literary studies, Religious studies, Studies of Specific literatures, and History of religions all with a PACE index of 3 or below) and another which is moving decisively in the direction of collaborative, peer-reviewed papers in English (e.g. Comparative language studies, Archaeology and Design with a PACE index of 17% or higher).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn order to obtain a closer look, four subjects from table 1 were selected for further analysis: general literary studies, history of ideas, philosophy, and general language studies and linguistics. The selection was made on the basis of different types of considerations. Firstly, we sought to select subjects with a comparably high PACE index (e.g. linguistics 23%) as well as subjects with a comparably low PACE index (e.g., general literary studies 3%); with 5 and 14%, respectively, history of ideas and philosophy are placed in between. Hence, seeking maximal distribution, the selection included subjects comparably high and low also in the aspects of PACE; philosophy, for example, having the highest share of articles (45%).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSecondly, we sought to create, to the extent possible, a match between subject and disciplines and departments, so as to enable other types of studies in the future. As an example, the subject history of ideas is institutionalized in Swedish academia in a way that enables studies that draw on observations and interviews at history of ideas departments in several Swedish universities. The same logic applies to departments of philosophy, linguistics, and literary studies. This selection, finally, gives a fairly broad representation of the Swedish humanities as whole, with both historical, linguistic and philosophical representation.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOur focused look at the publishing patterns in the selected four fields during the past 20 years reveal a number of ways in which, and extent to which, they are transitioning towards PACE (Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig2\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e2\u003c/span\u003e). As shown, PACE is increasing in all four disciplinary subject areas over the period, albeit considerably more so in Comparative Language Studies and Linguistics where a “leap” is also noticeable in the last five years.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNext, we will look at the individual aspects of PACE to determine to what extent individual aspects drive the overall pattern. As shown by Figs.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig6\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003ea–d, disentangling the composite PACE index in its aspects illustrates variations but also consistencies between subject areas. A clear tendency is the general uptick in peer review, also for publications in domestic outlets. In fact, the four chosen fields display less variation in this aspect of PACE. This suggests an overall acceptance of the international practice of peer review also for publications in other languages, in particular for book publications, to preserve and even resurrect these traditional forms and add to their credibility (Hammarfelt, Hammar \u0026amp; Franke 2022). As illustrated in Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig6\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003ea, the four selected subject areas have kept an even pace in this regard over the past 20 years.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eTurning to articles, Fig.\u0026nbsp;\u003cspan refid=\"Fig6\" class=\"InternalRef\"\u003e3\u003c/span\u003eb demonstrates that also the publication type of the research article plays out differently between the areas, with the result that different cultures of publishing emerge more clearly, with a clear-cut difference in how significant articles are the centerpiece for some, and one of many outlet forms for others.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn particular, the article has developed into becoming the prevailing publication type in philosophy and linguistics, where it is now the most common type. Yet, the article does not dominate greatly in either but co-exists with publication types such as book chapters. In fact, articles amount to 38% in philosophy and 31% in linguistics, and in history of ideas and literary studies, the book chapter is the prevailing publication type (Appendix Figure A1–A4).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOur third PACE aspect is co-authorship where a similar pattern emerges. While scholars in linguistics clearly have a higher propensity for collaborative publishing, the practice is more negligible in history of ideas and literary studies. It is, again, a strikingly consistent pattern over time that emerges which most likely showcases also different approaches to networking, funding and task distribution in the different fields. The level of co-authorship found in philosophy is closer (but still clearly above) to the two areas with a lower PACE score, where the increase has been substantial in the last 20 years.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eLastly, we turn our attention to language of publication. The use of English as language of scholarly communication is the most striking difference between cultures of publishing within the selected subject areas, with remarkably stable differences. This again highlights salient variations in the role of communication and the perception of English as a barrier – or a necessity – to engage with the respective scientific communities. In philosophy and linguistics, the audience is primarily found among international audiences, likely spurred by topics that are not bound by national borders, whereas history of ideas and literary studies still tend to engage with subject matters that deal with Swedish history and literature, intended for a national audience – scholars and the educated general public alike – with whom communication is best done in Swedish.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNotably, the diversity found among publication types (Appendix Figure A1–A4) manifests to a lesser degree in area of language of publishing. As shown in Appendix Table A2, the vast majority of all non-English publications are published in Swedish. While 33 other languages occur in the database, the numbers for each are vanishingly small, albeit it with the exception of literature studies where 5% are in German and 3,7% in French.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Discussion","content":"\u003cp\u003eThere are numerous possible explanations of the patterns outlined, both in terms of divergence between the humanities and other scientific areas and within humanities subject areas. The fact that PACE is, by and large, lower in the humanities may reflect the area\u0026rsquo;s mission \u0026ndash; real or perceived \u0026ndash; of catering to national knowledge needs, maintaining academic Swedish, and keeping contacts with the general public. This situation prompts scholars to increasingly publish both according to traditional (national) and emerging (international) regimes. Notably, while housing scholars with a self-image as public intellectuals, there are no subject areas with an inexistent share of PACE publications. The same situation yields friction: given the pluralism of different co-existing publishing norms, different expectations collide in evaluation processes for appointments (Ganuza \u0026amp; Sal\u0026ouml;, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR16\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e; Hammarfelt et al. \u003cspan citationid=\"CR25\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2024\u003c/span\u003e) as well as in other contexts of ascribing value to different forms of output amidst the increasingly complex tasks expected of universities. For example, co-authorship is sometimes viewed as something anomalous that calls for explanations. In Sweden, humanities scholars are regularly prompted to provide signed affidavits when relying on co-authored publications as basis for academic promotion or when writing a compilation thesis.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eVariation in PACE between humanities subject areas reflect varying intellectual inquires and the cultures developed to such ends (Becher, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1989\u003c/span\u003e). In complex ways, accordingly, the patterns co-vary with disciplinary differences relating to context-dependence, knowledge building and aspirations (Bernstein, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1999\u003c/span\u003e; Martin, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR43\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e). For example, the extent to which disciplinary subject areas are nationally linked or internationally interconnected will be mirrored in language choice; yet, beyond the necessity of using internationally viable languages, catering to international research communities may also push disciplines into realms where peer reviewed journal articles prevail, and where methodological procedures that demand many authors dominate.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDistinctions between overriding knowledge objectives and institutionalized types of scientific thought also have a bearing on aspects of scholarly communication such as those foregrounded in PACE. Using the division of nomothetic and idiographic fields might be useful to theoretically explain why \u0026ldquo;the humanities\u0026rdquo; cannot be understood as one monolithic culture in terms of publishing. Generalization-seeking and uniqueness-seeking orientations impact on the degree to which researchers collaborate (co-authorship), as well as on perceptions on envisioned audiences of their work (national or international) (Windelband, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR65\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1980\u003c/span\u003e). Applying this gaze to the humanities subject areas analyzed here, both philosophy and linguistics could be described as nomothetic by virtue of their aspiration to find patterns and regularities, and to rely on theoretical explanations that are applicable more generally. On their part, history of ideas and literature strive for an understanding of the particular or, as Windelband puts it, \u0026ldquo;the exhaustive portrayal of a particular, more or less protracted occurrence of a unique, temporally circumscribed reality (p. 12).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAdopting Windelband\u0026rsquo;s distinction enables a view of two cultures of humanities publishing that share a commitment to scholarly communication in accordance with a pluralist endeavor that reflects the many different missions of scholar in the humanities, but with two distinctly different approaches to this variation. In one, linguistics and philosophy, PACE serves as a normative yet flexible ideal; in the other, literary studies and history of ideas, PACE is an optional complement to what is largely a historically stable pattern of individual scholarship communicated in books written in the national language.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHowever, while more nomothetic oriented fields like linguistics and philosophy are likely to have a higher PACE-index, they may each exhibit internal polarity between nomothetic and idiographic orientations. This would suggest that each culture comprises subcultures. These considerations boil down to the question on how to parse the concept of culture. In our view, there are, \u003cem\u003epace\u003c/em\u003e Snow, strictly speaking not two binary cultures of publishing \u0026ndash; one for the natural sciences and one for the humanities. The latter, and most likely the former, displays a by a myriad of co-existing cultures. Yet, this is not to say that each subject area houses its own culture; rather, the humanities exhibit a culture of publishing that is characterized by diversity; that is, multiple publication types and languages of publishing.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWhile the index has the benefit of being able to provide a unified approximation of possible changes in publication practices, PACE should always be interpreted with the disciplinary, and national, context in mind. The aspect of language of publishing is especially sensitive to differences between countries in terms of language use. Moreover, the PACE index can only suggest the importance of different publications in the system at large, whereas both the relative weight awarded to them by scholars, the different amount of time spent on a specific publication form, or indeed the value attributed to them in different contexts of evaluation can only be estimated by investigation using other qualitative methods.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eComplexity resides behind each aspect of PACE. Caution thus applies to interpreting them as ready-made indicators, and they may each be investigated more deeply than we have done here. The share of English, for example, serves as a broad indicator of a given field\u0026rsquo;s international orientation but languages apart from English may also function as vehicles for transnational scientific communication. Concerning co-authorship, moreover, conventions differ when it comes to establishing contributions required to pass as legitimate author of a publication (Henriksen, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR26\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWith these caveats in mind, we believe the PACE-index can provide a fruitful lens from which to observe long-term trajectories in scholarly communication.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Conclusion","content":"\u003cp\u003eIntroducing the PACE-index, this article has sought to provide an empirical account that speaks to the question of bibliodiversity in the humanities. Pondering where and how the publishing practices of the humanities are in transition towards biblioconformity, we have provided an overview of publishing patterns in various disciplinary subject areas, and focused particularly on four of these to give a more detailed view that also encompasses trends. What comes out of the analysis is a pattern of divergence and convergence. PACE has been on the rise in the Swedish humanities over the past couple of decades, a situation similar to that of other areas. However, the development in the humanities has gone from low to relatively low \u0026ndash; the vast majority of all scholarly publications are \u003cem\u003enot\u003c/em\u003e PACE. Hence, in this regard, concerns of a diminished bibliodiversity in the Swedish humanities seem unwarranted. In fact, even those areas where shares of PACE are higher \u0026ndash; linguistics and philosophy \u0026ndash; display a variegated approach to publishing. Peer reviewed publications are gaining traction but have not superseded those that rely on other (informal, or non-existent) procedures of quality assurance. Similarly, co-authorship and single-authorship are used interchangeably. Languages other than English are used in scientific publishing, and journal articles co-exist with other publication types. Publications in the humanities are still highly divergent and represent a wide variety of functions within the fields. Book chapters and review articles play a significant role in all fields under study, and scholars have a broad palette of publishing forums at their deployment, which showcases pluralist and eclectic forms of scholarly communication. Accordingly, while there is an upward trend of conformity, diversity marks the culture of publishing prevalent in the humanities today.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eImplications for research policy include basing policies on a nuanced understanding of diversity in and between areas of research. The humanities are not underdeveloped and in a slow progress towards STEMM ideals but have their logic of coalescing different aspects of scholarly communication. Policy should conceive of areas as equally relevant for scientific progress \u0026ndash; especially given the complexity of issues that research policy addresses (security, sustainability etc.) \u0026ndash; which calls for a design of policy instrument to accommodate such differences.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFunders and patrons in the humanities, including faculties and deans, should realize that the humanities constitute a complex area with broad internal differences, and integrate these differences into a collective understanding of how the humanities contribute to the understanding of the human condition. Variation is not bad in itself but should be carefully nourished and curated to enhance mutual learning and respectful communication between different humanities subjects. If this does not happen, there is a risk that the humanities will continue to be marginalized in policy and within universities.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Declarations","content":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFunding Declaration\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis work was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (grant number RIK23-0007).\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eAuthor Contribution\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eConceptualization and conception of the main idea: LS. Data collection and curation: GS. Original manuscript drafting: LS. MB, IH, BH and GS reviewed and edited the manuscript, and contributed with original writing. All authors read and approved the manuscript.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eAcknowledgement\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis work was produced within the project Humanities in Transition, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (grant number RIK23-0007). The study has been presented at the WORM Exploratory Workshop on Research Metrics, Uppsala 2024, the HERO Research Seminar, Uppsala 2025, and the Humanities in Transition Workshop, Sigtuna, 2025. We are grateful for the comments received at these events.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eData Availability\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eBibliometric data downloaded from the Swepub database that support the findings of this study have been deposited in Figshare, https://doi.org/10.17045/sthlmuni.30018595\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eAmmon U (ed) (2001) \u003cem\u003eThe dominance of English as a language of science: Effects on other languages and language communities\u003c/em\u003e. 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Cambridge University Press, Cambridge\u003c/li\u003e\n\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":true,"hideJournal":false,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":false,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"humanities-and-social-sciences-communications","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"palcomms","sideBox":"Learn more about [Humanities \u0026 Social Sciences Communications](http://www.nature.com/palcomms/)","snPcode":"41599","submissionUrl":"https://submission.springernature.com/new-submission/41599/3","title":"Humanities and Social Sciences Communications","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"stoa","reportingPortfolio":"Nature AJ","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false},"keywords":"","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-7507698/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-7507698/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003cp\u003eIn 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\u0026ndash;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.\u003c/p\u003e","manuscriptTitle":"Cultures of humanities publishing: Introducing the PACE-index to understand diversity and conformity in scholarly communication","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2025-09-09 14:40:32","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-7507698/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"12766395780903157830072266246184217719","date":"2026-05-12T05:46:27+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewersInvited","content":"","date":"2026-05-07T05:24:41+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorInvited","content":"","date":"2025-09-26T07:01:23+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorAssigned","content":"","date":"2025-09-24T08:54:38+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"checksComplete","content":"","date":"2025-09-03T07:20:28+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"submitted","content":"Humanities and Social Sciences Communications","date":"2025-09-01T11:02:01+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"humanities-and-social-sciences-communications","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"palcomms","sideBox":"Learn more about [Humanities \u0026 Social Sciences Communications](http://www.nature.com/palcomms/)","snPcode":"41599","submissionUrl":"https://submission.springernature.com/new-submission/41599/3","title":"Humanities and Social Sciences Communications","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"stoa","reportingPortfolio":"Nature AJ","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"3a0e32d0-47f5-42e3-88fa-86ae2e89b498","owner":[],"postedDate":"September 9th, 2025","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"12766395780903157830072266246184217719","date":"2026-05-12T05:46:27+00:00","index":99,"fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewersInvited","content":"15","date":"2026-05-07T05:24:41+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""}],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"under-review","subjectAreas":[{"id":54113187,"name":"Humanities/Cultural and media studies"},{"id":54113188,"name":"Social science/Cultural and media studies"},{"id":54113189,"name":"Social science/Education"},{"id":54113190,"name":"Humanities/Language and linguistics"},{"id":54113191,"name":"Social science/Language and linguistics"},{"id":54113192,"name":"Humanities/Literature"}],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2026-05-07T05:39:28+00:00","versionOfRecord":[],"versionCreatedAt":"2025-09-09 14:40:32","video":"","vorDoi":"","vorDoiUrl":"","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-7507698","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-7507698","identity":"rs-7507698","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"8U1c8b4HqxoKbykW_rLl7","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}