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Thinly spread excellence makes Europe vulnerable to competition from America and the far east, says Andrea Bonaccorsi.
Everyone in Europe wants excellent universities. In countries with strong research traditions, policymakers fear that increasing global competition will overshadow past glories. In laggard nations, there is the perception that scientific excellence is crucial for catching up.
This debate has been shaped by global university rankings, which have few European institutions in the top places. Unfortunately, such rankings offer little guidance to policymakers: their upper reaches are relatively stable, while their methodologies make it hard to interpret movements in their lower reaches.
In recent research looking at the scientific output of universities worldwide, my colleagues and I took a different perspective—with interesting and alarming results. Europe, we found, is lagging behind both North America and Asia in its production of excellent science, and has few universities that are strong across many disciplines.
We defined excellent research as publications in the top 10 per cent of journals. These top journals were identified using a metric called the source normalised impact per paper, a measure of citations that adjusts for variation in citation rates between fields, using data from Elsevier’s Scopus database. Instead of aggregating at the university level, we considered scientific disciplines separately, identifying 251 disciplines from journal subject categories, grouped into 14 broad fields.
Large numbers of publications and citations in top journals are necessary for excellence, but not sufficient. Leading universities have strength in both depth and breadth, with a high proportion of faculty publishing and being cited in top journals. To detect these institutions, we measured the proportion of an institution’s publications that qualify as excellent, adding a subjective definition of excellence to the commonly used objective definition. Applying these measures to 1,337 universities in Europe, North America, Asia and Oceania, we came to worrying conclusions for European policymakers.
First, while the gap between Europe and the United States is widely appreciated, a gap is also opening with the far east. Asian universities produced 36 per cent of the papers in our sample, compared with 32 per cent for Europe. Looking at citations, North America has a clear lead, while Europe and Asia are almost neck and neck.
Second, scientific excellence in Europe is widely distributed. Of the universities with the highest proportion of excellent papers, 243 European institutions feature in the top decile for at least one field, compared with 155 for North America and 94 for Asia.
European universities, however, tend to excel in only one or two broad disciplines, whereas the top institutions in the US are typically strong in five to eight.
There are different routes to building and sustaining universities. US institutions have great autonomy in hiring and research decisions, while Asian governments have targeted investments in specific fields and places. Europe’s approach falls in between, hinting at why—with the caveat that we looked only at the sciences—it has few institutions that are strong in a broad range of fields.
Many European universities see themselves as excellent because they are world-leading in a few disciplines. This perception is correct. What is wrong is the conclusion that this is a stepping stone to global leadership.
The major countries in continental Europe—Germany, France, Italy and Spain—lack a core of a few large, well-funded, attractive universities that can compete globally in more than half of the fields in which they operate. These countries have also followed different institutional paths to excellence—in some cases building new institutions, in others giving extra funding to existing ones—but none has managed to build large and attractive institutions that are excellent in a sustainable way.
Faced with this landscape, the idea that countries such as Germany or France could, with sufficient funding, sustain 10 or more globally leading universities is unrealistic. Focusing on two or three would be a better target—as Switzerland has done successfully.
This situation also has implications for laggard regions. Policy here should target outstanding groups and individuals, rather than institutions. Excellence cannot be fostered by spreading funds thinly.
With academic mobility and competition increasing, powerhouse universities matter. Broad excellence has become the definition of a world-class university, able to attract talent from all over the world. This issue may not be at the top of the policy agenda. But to the extent that governments believe universities are important for their futures, it may be time to rethink policies to sustain the continent’s excellent research.
Andrea Bonaccorsi is professor of economics and management at the University of Pisa. See also Scientometrics vol. 110, p. 217-241 (2017) and Journal of Informetrics vol. 11, p. 435-454 (2017).
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This article also appeared in Research Europe