| Krzysztof Klincewicz carried out a multidimensional comparison of twenty-four Polish universities, including their scientific production, impact of research measured by forward citations to articles, and the internationalization of scientific research interpreted as article co-authorship with representatives of foreign research institutions. Polish shares of publications with co-authors from other European Union countries turned out to be higher that the corresponding shares for France, Germany, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and Sweden, but the Poles were less inclined to cooperate with their US colleagues. The 24 analyzed universities were the most scientifically productive higher education institutions in Poland, selected from among the 566 Polish affiliations identified in Elsevier Scopus database. Based on bibliometric analysis of articles published between the years of 2000 and 2009, Jagiellonian University of Krakow and University of Warsaw were identified as the most active institutions, distancing all other universities and accounting for about 19% of the total scientific production of the selected sample. While the Jagiellonian University had a slightly larger number of publications, the University of Warsaw received more citations to every published article and had a higher share of articles co-authored with foreign researchers. The analysis confirmed that publishing an article with a foreign co-author correlates highly with its increased impact in scientific community (number of citations), thus suggesting possible publication strategies for Polish researchers.
In a follow-up study, conducted jointly with researchers from Kielce University of Technology, the same dataset was supplemented by data on employees, students and other inputs at the analyzed universities and used to build a DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) model, which identified the most effective Polish universities. The approach offered an interesting methodological alternative to the institutional assessment of universities, used by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education in Poland. |
