The European Center of Science Productivity: Research Universities and Institutes in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom

Growth in scientific productivity over the 20th century resulted significantly from three major countries in European science—France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. We chart the development of universities and research institutes that bolster Europe’s key position in global science. We uncover both stable and dynamic patterns of productivity in the fields of STEM, including health, over the twentieth century. On-going internationalization of higher education and science has been accompanied by increasing competition and collaboration. Despite policy goals to foster innovation and expand research capacity, policies cannot fully account for the differential growth of scientific productivity we chart from 1975 to 2010. Our neoinstitutional framework facilitates explanation of differences in institutional settings, organizational forms, and organizations that produce the most European research. We measure growth of published peer-reviewed articles indexed in Thomson Reuters’ Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE).
Organizational forms vary in their contributions, with universities accounting for nearly half but rising in France; ultrastable in Germany at four-fifths, and growing at around two-thirds in the UK. Differing institutionalization pathways created the conditions necessary for continuous, but varying growth in scientific productivity in the European center of global science. The research university is central in all three countries, and we identify organizations leading in research output. Few analyses explicitly compare across time, space, and different levels of analysis. We show how important European science has been to overall global science productivity. In-depth comparisons, especially the organizational fields and forms in which science is produced, are crucial if policy is to support research and development.