Swedish Political Science: a bibliometric analysis. Citations, productivity measures and rankings have become reality in modern university life. Many of the bibliometric reports presented by ranking institutes and non-professional bibliometricians are flawed due to methodologically unsound procedures. This article discusses three important methodological problems involved in bibliometric studies: 1) number of personnel at university departments; 2) counting of articles from these departments; and 3) counting of citations to these articles. Relating to earlier research (Hix, 2004) it is shown that the counting of personnel - a very important reference value - can be conducted in several different ways. Following Dale & Goldfinch (2005) we discuss the limitation to political science journals proposed by Hix. There is a large influx of non political scientist to the area and a similar outflow of political scientists to other journal categories (e.g. environmental studies). Therefore, the proposed limitation is questioned. Implementing advanced methods for field normalized citation scores (van Raan, 2004) we conclude the article with an analysis of Swedish university departments in political science during the period 1998-2005. The result is a promising 33 per cent better citation scores than the world average, but the downside is a low number of articles per researcher.
