Cognitive strategies of growth vs. excellence at European universities

We present an innovative analysis of university production (publications) and effect (citations) in various scientific fields to understand how universities “think”. The paper studies 10 European universities selected from different tiers of a university ranking and compare their cognitive strategies of growth: in particular, whether excellence, i.e. above average relative citations in a field facilitates growth of the same field later. The counterintuitive result is that excellence does not correlate with growth but with size (the amount of publications). This indicates that growth is not a consequence but may be a prerequisite of success. The approach is informed from the analysis of big data - we analyse complete datasets comprising a decade.