Europe 2020 and the European Research Area: the response by three small European countries

Both Europe 2020 and the European Research Area initiatives seek to better prepare the European Union (EU) to compete in the future. Towards this end, both programs encourage more scientific publications and international collaboration by the European member-states. The purpose of this research paper is to analyze the smallest EU member-states and their respective universities (Cyprus, Luxembourg, and Malta), and how they have responded to these efforts. Our observation periods are divided between 2005–2010 and 2011–2016 with the latter being after the announcement of Europe 2020 in 2010. Our findings are that all three universities published many more articles in the second period. In addition, two of the universities had higher collaboration scores. However, while more international collaboration is usually associated with a higher impact of articles, our results are somewhat mixed. It seems that smaller countries benefit from international collaboration, but they must not move too far away from any distinctive scientific competences they have already developed. We also provide detailed mapping of the countries with whom the universities collaborated.