The interplay of the size of the research system, ways of collaboration, level, and method of funding in determining bibliometric outputs

This article analyzes the effect of country size, level of funding, method of financing, and ways of collaboration on scientific publication output in terms of the number of articles published and citations received in the scientific literature across national research systems. This article takes an initial step toward integrating mentioned aspects into one analysis because previously, they have been studied incoherently as separate issues. The study encompasses European countries using data provided by Clarivate Analytics, the European Commission and Eurostat. Based on the empirical analysis, three conclusions emerge. Firstly, we have to reject the proposition that the function of scientific production exhibits increasing returns to scale. Secondly, transnationally coordinated research projects have a strong positive effect on countries’ number of articles and citations. Smaller countries participate proportionally more in transnationally coordinated research and are therefore more affected by the phenomena of hyperauthorship. This explains why several small nations perform above their weight in impact relative to spending. Thirdly, the share of competitive project-based funding does not affect the number of articles published but has a U-shaped relationship with research impact per article, pointing toward two alternative financing strategies for maximizing impact based on high or low share of project-based funding. Based on the analysis, we present strengths and weaknesses of European countries’ research systems for policy purposes.