Research in science The Faculty of Science and Technology at Umeå University provides education and performs research in a number of fields, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, engineering, didactics, industrial design, and architecture.
A description of the Faculty – the classical picture A faculty is a complex entity. It is therefore not trivial to obtain a full and comprehensible description of such an entity. The Faculty of Science and Technology at Umeå University has over nine hundred employees, mainly distributed over researchers, teachers, PhD students, and technical and administrative personal (see ”The Faculty in numbers”). We are active at eleven departments (see “The organization of the Faculty”), provide education at a number of programs, and have a plentitude of research directions. Although there are several documents (financial and activity reports) that describe the faculty in detail and from different perspectives that are updated yearly, they only provide a formal description of the organization of the faculty, its conditions for education and research, and highlight notable events (awards, nominations, etc.); there is no general description of what kind of research that is being pursued at the faculty. Although one can get some insight of this from the activity reports of the various departments, these reports are however often written from the departments’ own perspective; they do therefore not provide a coherent description of the research pursued at the faculty. In fact, such a description cannot be found anywhere.
THE FACULTY IN NUMBERS 2017: • Employees: 906 • Booked revenues for direct government research funding: 361 MSEK • Externally funded research: 299 MSEK • Research assignments: 33 MSEK • Booked revenues for undergraduate education 311 MSEK • Full-year undergraduate or graduate students: 3 190 and PhD students: 239. Largest external public research financers 20122017: • The Swedish research council (Vetenskapsrådet, VR): 60–70 MSEK/year • FORMAS with approximately 25–30 MSEK per year • EU contributions have varied between 15 and 30 MEK/year. According to DiVA, the researchers of the Faculty produce (as principal authors or co-author) more than 650 publications per year.
What research is pursued at the Faculty? A description seen from a research field perspective To acquire an adequate description of the Faculty from a research perspective, so as to get to know ourselves better and be able to answer questions like “What research do we really pursue at our Faculty?”, the Research Committee of the Faculty (swe. forskningskommittén) was of the opinion that it would be beneficial if its research could be presented in a coherent and consistent way. However, it was considered that such a description should not be based on the activities of the various departments, as this would not provide a sufficiently coherent description. Therefore, an activity aimed at obtaining a congruent description of the research conducted at the Faculty with respect to its various research fields was initiated. By utilizing a clustering method based on bibliome-
tric data conducted by one of the bibliometrics of the university, the publications published by the Faculty researchers over a period of 8 years (2009–2016) were grouped into research clusters (see “How the clustering was made”). To be included in the analysis, each publication had to meet a number of basic requirements (as described in “The conditions for a publication to be included in the clustering”). It was found that there were a total of 5 785 publications that met the requirements. These were therefore chosen as the basis for the analysis. The clustering was then based on the number of unique terms in the material according to the information given in the Appendix and resulted in the publications