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This study analyzes the unprecedented growth of international research collaboration (IRC) in Europe during the period 2009–2018 in terms of co-authorship and citation distribution of globally indexed publications. The results reveal the dynamics of this change, as growing IRC moves European systems away from institutional collaboration, with stable and strong national collaboration. Domestic output has remained flat. The growth in publications in major European systems is almost entirely attributable to internationally co-authored papers. A comparison of trends within the four complementary collaboration modes clearly reveals that the growth of European science is driven solely by internationally co-authored papers. With the emergence of global network science, which diminishes the role of national policies in IRC and foregrounds the role of scientists, the individual scientist’s willingness to collaborate internationally is central to advancing IRC in Europe. Scientists collaborate internationally when it enhances their academic prestige, scientific recognition, and access to research funding, as indicated by the credibility cycle, prestige maximization, and global science models. The study encompassed 5.5 million Scopus-indexed articles, including 2.2 million involving international collaboration.

Universities and other organizations providing higher level education are collectively called Higher Education Institutions. Their detail data, for instance number of students, number of graduates, etc., constitute the basis for several important analyses of the educational systems. This work provides data of the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER), which describes the Educational Institutions of Europe. These data have been gathered through the National Statistical Authorities of all the Countries participant in the ETER Project. However, they include many scattered missing values. Therefore, we have developed and applied an imputation methodology (see “Imputation Techniques for the Reconstruction of Missing Interconnected Data from Higher Educational Institutions, Bruni et al. [3]) to replace the missing values with feasible values being as similar as possible to the original values that have been lost and are now unknown. Thus, we also provide the imputed version of the same dataset, which allows more in-depth analyses of the European Higher Education Institutions. Both datasets (before and after imputation) are provided in two versions: with or without bibliometric information for the Institutions, so the user can also consider these additional information if interested.

The location of this research is the university, through which we are progressively channeled into a seemingly insoluble Gordian knot. What is our participation in the university and what cultural and human commitments inform this participation? More trivially, what rights and duties does the individual acquire or lose within his or her academic identities? Our main target was finding an ideal organizational practice to examine, such as an emergency event. What strategy can the university adopt? Can it realign its distortions and retain its resources? How and in what ways? What information is needed for this purpose? Which actors are relevant in this process? A systemic survey model is, therefore, presented to analyze data obtained from a sample of 200 respondents from various academic groups, including students, professors, administrative staff, and other stakeholders. Quotas were used for the primary challenge posed by the pictures representing dimensions according to a systemic schema of organizational effectiveness (OE). Respondents were then asked to judge the dimensions and pictures against their personal capacity for intellectual identity, functionalism, and materialism. During the test, the participants were expected to develop their capacity to approach phenomenal consciousness and the search for its neural correlates, thereby becoming familiar with the high-order demands and challenges posed by the current information available to them. A nine-item interval behaviorally anchored rating scale (BARS) was used to develop a systemic matrix that could show the participants&rsquo, collective OE when an emergency event occurs at the university. This study aims to stimulate a broader investigation into the preparation of programs and plans that should be a priority today in the context of sustainability in educational institutions, thereby setting useful thresholds on decision-making paths. To develop the collective model, a matrix generated by each respondents&rsquo, dimensional modal values (DMVs) in the test and the overall samples&rsquo, modal values (OMMVs) were used. Borrowing from Luce&rsquo, s theory of probability, we analyzed the similarity of the OE university matrix from the results in descending order, restricting our attention to modal values which were chosen for the test and demonstrate how the learning model was formulated to assume that each group with evolved behavior could respond adaptively to a conditional function thanks to its permanence in a university environment.

This article examines highly paid academics—or top earners—employed across universities in ten European countries based on large-scale international survey data regarding the academic profession. It examines the relationships between salaries and academic behaviors and productivity, as well as the predictors of becoming an academic top earner. While, in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the university research mission typically pays off at an individual level, in Continental Europe, it pays off only in combination with administrative and related duties. Seeking future financial rewards solely through research does not seem to be a viable strategy in Europe, but seeking satisfaction in research through solving research puzzles is also becoming difficult, with the growing emphasis on the ‘relevance’ and ‘applicability’ of fundable research. Thus, both the traditional ‘investment motivation’ and ‘consumption motivation’ to perform research decrease, creating severe policy implications. The primary data come from 8,466 usable cases.

Research integrity is imperative to good science. Nonetheless, many countries and institutions develop their own integrity guidance, thereby risking incompatibilities with guidance of collaborating institutions. We retrieved guidance for academic integrity and misconduct of 18 universities from 10 European countries and investigated accessibility, general content, principles endorsed, and definitions of misconduct. Accessibility and content differ substantially between institutions. There are general trends of common principles of integrity and definitions of misconduct, yet differences remain. Parallel with previous research, we distinguish different approaches in integrity guidance; one emphasizes broad values of integrity, and the other details negative behaviors of misconduct. We propose that a balance between both approaches is necessary to preserve trust, meaning, and realism of guidance on research integrity. The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The principal investigator (Noemie Aubert Bonn) was funded by the European Commission for participating in the Erasmus Mundus Master of Bioethics 2013-2014 during which this project took place, and is currently funded by an Internal Funding PhD fellowship of Hasselt University, Belgium (UHasselt BOF Nieuw initiatief 15NI05). Kris Dierickx is funded by the Internal Funds (IF) KU Leuven project C24/15/032. Simon Godecharle was funded until February 2016 by the Research Foundation-Flanders (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek-Vlaanderen), PhD Fellowship: 11U8214N. Starting from March 2016, Simon is coordinator of health care ethics in the health care group Emmaus (Belgium).

The paper makes use of a novel dataset at European level which includes data on academic staff and students of universities from official National Statistical Authorities, bibliometric indicators on publications, and socio-economic indicators at regional level. The dataset covers all European countries. The unit of analysis is a combination between teaching activities at the level of Field of Education and publications classified by Field of Science, resulting in five major integrated areas of STEM (Science; Engineering; Computer Science; Agriculture; Medicine). Using a multilevel modeling framework and comparing results across disciplinary areas the paper finds strong support for peer effects at institutional level and for the positive effect of international collaborations and attraction of foreign PhD students. It does not find support for economies of scale in research, institutional age, specialization effects and private vs private governance. The external regional environment has an impact on research productivity only in applied disciplines.

This paper investigates the efficiency of European universities in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We make use of newly published University Impact Rankings that account for SDGs, whereby institutions that achieved high scores are those that are, in addition to scientific research, putting more efforts in areas such as gender inequality, quality education for all, climate change, achieving peaceful societies and economic growth. In our empirical analysis, we adopt a dual approach. At a country level, we investigate efficiency of public expenditure on tertiary education, while at a university level we analyse the efficiency of the resources employed in achieving higher rankings (in terms of SDGs). Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) results indicate that, at a macro level, only three to four countries in our sample are fully efficient. They could, therefore, without changing government tertiary expenditures on education, produce about 20% better score on University impact rankings. At a micro level, only about 16 percent of universities is efficient. Their performance could be much improved, without increasing the inputs, especially in terms of supporting SDGs through cooperation with other countries, the promotion of best practices and the publication of data in cooperation with foreign authors.

The paper links higher education reforms and welfare states reforms in postcommunist Central European countries. It links current higher education debates (and reform pressures) and public sector debates (and reform pressures), stressing the importance of communist-era legacies in both areas. It refers to existing typologies of both higher education governance and welfare state regimes and concludes that the lack of the inclusion of Central Europe in any of them is a serious theoretical drawback in comparative social research. The region should still, after more than two decades of transition and heavy international policy advising, be viewed as a “laboratory of social experimentation”. It is still too risky to suggest generalizations about how Central European higher education and welfare systems fit existing typologies. Consequently, the “transition” period is by no means over: it is over in terms of politics and economics but not in terms of social arrangements. Both higher education and welfare states should be viewed as “work in progress”: permanently under reform pressures, and with unclear future.

Design of high performance, low cost and clean propulsion systems requires multiple disciplines such as physics, mathematics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering and specialisms like control engineering and safety. This paper details the program of EU FP7 Multi-ITN project ADvanced Electric Powertrain Technology (ADEPT) and presents a review of current research achievements of the recruited fellows. The ADEPT programme will provide a virtual research lab community from labs of European universities and industries. After finishing the ADEPT project, the know-how and expertise will also be opened to other research organizations or industry beyond those involved in the project. Special attention in this paper is given to ADEPT Virtual Library - collection of component level, sub-system level and system level components produced and maintained by the ADEPT Consortium. Functional Mock-up Interface (FMI) standard for model exchange and simulation is described and its connection with the ADEPT project is established.

1. Liudmila Arcimaviciene[1][1] 1. 1Vilnius University, Lithuania 1. Liudmila Arcimaviciene, Vilnius University, Universiteto 5, Vilnius, 01131, Lithuania. Email: liudmila.arcimaviciene{at}uki.vu.lt In the last 10 years, a highly productive space of metaphor analysis has been established in the discourse studies of media, politics, business, and education. In the theoretical framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis, the restored metaphorical patterns are especially valued for their implied ideological value as realized both conceptually and linguistically. By using the analytical framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis and procedurally employing Pragglejaz Group’s Metaphor Identification Procedure, this study aims at analyzing the implied value of the evoked metaphors in the mission statements of the first 20 European Universities, according to the Webometrics ranking. In this article, it is proposed that Universities’ mission statements are based on the positive evaluation of the COMMERCE metaphor, which does not fully correlate with the ideological framework of sustainability education but is rather oriented toward consumerism in both education and society. Despite this overall trend, there are some traceable features of the conceptualization reflecting the sustainability approach to higher education, as related to freedom of speech, tolerance, and environmental concerns. Nonetheless, these are suppressed by the metaphoric usages evoking traditional dogmas of the conservative ideology grounded in the concepts of the transactional approach to relationship, competitiveness for superiority, the importance of self-interest and strength, and quantifiable quality. [1]: #aff-1

In this paper, we focus on a rare scholarly theme of highly productive academics, statistically confirming their pivotal role in knowledge production across 11 systems studied. The upper 10 % of highly productive academics in 11 European countries studied (N = 17,211) provide on average almost half of all academic knowledge production. In contrast to dominating bibliometric studies of research productivity, we focus on academic attitudes, behaviors, and perceptions as predictors of becoming research top performers across European systems. Our paper provides a (large-scale and cross-country) corroboration of the systematic inequality in knowledge production, for the first time argued for by Lotka (J Wash Acad Sci 16:317–323, 1929) and de Solla Price (Little science, big science. Columbia University Press, New York, 1963). We corroborate the deep academic inequality in science and explore this segment of the academic profession. The European research elite is a highly homogeneous group of academics whose high research performance is driven by structurally similar factors, mostly individual rather than institutional. Highly productive academics are similar from a cross-national perspective, and they substantially differ intra-nationally from their lower-performing colleagues.

This paper focuses on a generational change taking place in the Polish academic profession: a change in behaviors and attitudes between two groups of academics. One was socialized to academia under the communist regime (1945-1989) and the other entered the profession in the post-1989 transition period. Academics of all age groups are beginning to learn how tough the competition for research funding is, but young academics (“academics under 40”), being the target of recent policy initiatives, need to learn faster. Current reforms present a clear preferred image for a new generation of Polish academics: highly motivated, embedded in international research networks, publishing mostly internationally, and heavily involved in the competition for academic recognition and research funding. In the long run, without such a radical approach, any international competition between young Polish academics (with a low research orientation and high teaching hours) and their young Western European colleagues (with a high research orientation and low teaching hours) seems inconceivable, as our data on the average academic productivity clearly demonstrate. The quantitative background of this paper comes from 3,704 returned questionnaires and the qualitative background from 60 semi-structured in-depth interviews. The paper takes a European comparative approach and contrasts Poland with 10 Western European countries (using 17,211 returned questionnaires).

European higher education systems in the last few decades have been in a period of intensive quantitative expansion. Both participation rates and student numbers in most European countries are still growing – but are the chances of young people from lower socioeconomic classes to enter universities higher than before? Under massification conditions, are the chances of young people from poorer backgrounds actually increasing, relative to increasing chances of young people from higher socioeconomic classes and wealthier backgrounds? Are both overall social mobility and relative social mobility of under-represented classes increasing at the same rate? That is a question about changing social mobility relative to the share of particular socioeconomic classes in the population as a whole. Social mobility in increasingly knowledge-driven economies is powerfully linked to equitable access to higher education. And the question of inequality in access to higher education is usually asked today in the context of educational expansion. Educational expansion, in most general terms, and in the majority of European countries studied, seems to be reducing inequality of access. There are ever more students with lower socioeconomic backgrounds, and ever more graduates whose parents had only primary education credentials. The chances of the latter to enter higher education are increasing across Europe but are still very low. The intergenerational patterns of transmission of education are still very rigid across all European systems: the offspring of the low-educated is predominantly low-educated; the offspring of the highly educated is predominantly highly educated. Structurally similar patterns can be shown for occupations: the offspring of those in the best occupations predominantly take best occupations, and the offspring of those in the worst occupations predominantly take the worst occupations, across all European countries (“best” being structurally similar and linked to both middle-class earnings and lifestyles in Europe. Equitable access to higher education is linked in this chapter empirically to the social background of students, viewed from two parallel perspectives: educational background of parents and occupational background of parents, and studied through the large-scale EU-SILC (European Union Survey on Income and Living Conditions) dataset.

Engineering syllabi often lack courses covering occupational risk prevention. In Spain, professional competences are awarded along with the completion of a university degree. This means that new graduates are certified in areas in which they have received little or no training, such as occupational risk prevention. However, the academic reforms established by the Bologna Process, which strives to homogenize university degrees throughout Europe, compels European universities to design new syllabi. The main goal of this paper is to define a framework for including occupational risk-prevention education in the new engineering syllabi. This exploratory research applied the Delphi methodology to a panel of 59 experts, using questionnaires assessed with a four-point Likert scale through two rounds. A website supported the information flow. According to the experts who participated in this study, education and training in occupational risk-prevention is essential for improving the safety culture within a company or workplace. The experts concurred that this subject should be a separate mandatory course in all engineering degree programs. The participants recommended that an optional course should be considered only if a mandatory course is not approved. It was also deemed desirable to integrate occupational risk prevention as a cross-field subject in other technological courses, even if the curriculum already includes some related courses. © 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.

One of the most important issues in aircraft noise monitoring systems is the correct detection and marking of aircraft sound events through their measurement profiles, as this influences the reported results. In the recent ISO 20906 (unattended monitoring of aircraft sound in the vicinity of airports) this marking task is split into: detection from the sound level time history, classification of probable aircraft sound events, and the concluding identification of aircraft sound events through non-acoustic features. An experiment was designed to evaluate the factors that influence the marking tasks and quantify their contribution to the uncertainty of the reported monitoring results for some specific cases. Several noise time histories, recorded in three different locations affected by flyover noise, were analyzed by practitioners selected according to three different expertise levels. The analysis was carried out considering three types of complementary information: Noise recordings, list of aircraft events and no information at all. Five European universities and over 60 participants were involved in this experiment. The results showed that there were no significant differences in the results derived from factors such as the participant's institution or the expertise of the practitioners. Nonetheless, other factors, like the noise event dynamic range or the type of help used for marking, have a statistically significant influence on the marking tasks. They cause an increase of the uncertainty of the reported monitoring and can lead to changes in the overall results. The experiment showed that, even when there are no classification and identification errors, the detection stage causes uncertainty in the results. The standard uncertainty for detection ranges from 0.3 dB for those acoustic environments where aircraft are clearly detectable to almost 2 dB in more difficult environments. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The recognition of women's growing quantitative participation in higher education worldwide has to date been rarely accompanied by analysis of the quality of this participation. In Europe, the national and transnational policies of the past few decades have promoted female inclusion in higher education, through positive action aimed at bridging the gender gap, but have not taken into account the different human experience, aspirations, values and expertise of women, interpreting these as a minus value and thereby neutralizing the sexual difference in a universalistic male-dominated paradigm. This article draws on case-study research in five European universities, exploring the free, original voice of women who, as teachers, researchers and university administrators, recount their own university experience, the obstacles in their path and the resistance met with, as well as their own strategies and work practices – including inventive practices – expressing in words their desires and aspirations above and beyond the given order. In the current crisis of the Western universities, caught in the grips of financial distress and symbolic conflicts regarding their mission, we need to give a political transformative sense to these practices and words, offering a new measure of university life necessary for all.

With a view to meeting the demands of the knowledge economy and taking up a leading role in its further development, Europe and its member states are urging universities and institutions for higher education more generally to innovate and modernise themselves. Organisational structures, governance and management systems, curricula and teaching methods, and funding and incentives mechanisms are no longer considered to be adequate to guarantee that European universities can keep up with global competition in education, research and innovation. Innovation and modernisation are also considered to be necessary with regard to the public (i.e. social, cultural and political) role of universities. Today’s knowledge-intensive economies and societies are regarded as in need of up-to-date policies on equal opportunities, participation and access, and of strategies for knowledge-driven local and regional economic, social and cultural development. In addition to this and based on a concern about European citizenship, democratic involvement and social cohesion, there is a requirement for the development of curricula, extra-curricular activities and participation structures that offer students opportunities to develop civic competencies.

The rise of social software poses the challenges to the design and evaluation of a pedagogically sound online learning environment (OLE). Our OLE addresses these challenges by the integration of three pedagogical concepts - cross-cultural collaboration, self-directed learning and social networking - with the aim to advance participants' competencies and by mixed-method approaches to evaluating the complex situations. A validation trial involving four European countries was conducted. Groups of students co-created a questionnaire, which was assessed to provide an indicator of task performance. Multi-source (surveys, blogs, emails, diaries, chats, videoconference, and interviews) and multi-perspective data (facilitators, students, researchers) were studied with social network analysis, content analysis and conversation analysis. Several a posteriori research questions are addressed. ACM SIGCHI Publisher's Version WOS:000266407100037

Until now, what most researchers in HE have done is to choose between aggregate data at national system level provided by statistical offices, or detailed case-study data collected for single individual higher education institutions (HEIs). An important innovation of the Aquameth project has been the collection of meso-level data – that is, data at the level of whole HEIs – on a part of the European university system (six countries) in a systematic way, by applying broad common definitions of data categories across countries and collecting information already available at national level. Nevertheless, the Aquameth database which per se represents a very important result of the project has to be handled with care. It cannot be used in a ‘data mining’ way, but its exploitation needs a profound understanding of the meaning of the contained data and of their limitations, due both to conceptual problems and to the data collection procedures. This chapter deals with these kinds of issues with two major aims: to serve as a guide for those interested in further exploiting the database and to point out some major improvements in data which are urgently needed.

Higher education institutions (HEI) are crucial to the development of the European Research Area. However, unlike in US, the availability of quantitative indicators for individual HEI at the European level is severely limited by several methodological issues, data availability problems and national institutional constraints. The paper discusses strategies for collecting and validating data from different national sources; the limitations of the available data for different categories of indicators and, finally, the influence of the heterogeneity of the national higher education systems on the comparability at the European level. Based on the experience of two recently completed projects, the paper shows that, despite these problems, it is possible to collect relatively coherent data on European higher education institutions and to develop a set of consequential indicators. Further, it provides advice on how to exploit them for comparative purposes in a sensible way. It concludes by indicating areas where major improvements are urgently needed, and, advocates for an European Science and Technology Indicators Platform to maintain and develop, in a long-term perspective, these data sets.

One of the most common definitions of Service-Learning (S-L) programs refers to the use of community-based projects to supplement traditional curricula of the students and to enrich “by doing” the subjects covered in the teaching environment. The aim of this paper is to present a review of the international S-L programs in higher education system (European and international Universities) and to analyze those ideas that could be implemented in Romania. While in most of the SL international programs, the agents involved in the delivery of the SL programs are the teachers, we will especially discuss those SL programs in which the agents are not the teachers, but specific categories of students. Specifically, we performed a case study of the Faculty of Psychology and Sciences of Education (“Babes-Bolyai” University, Romania), which, since 1992, has one of the most active Student Associations in Romania, i.e. Romanian Association of Psychology Students (RAPS). Also, the Faculty has several successful distance learning programs in Psychology, Special Education and Pedagogy. Thus, the Faculty has these two student-based categories of driving forces in terms of offering themselves SL activities: (1) a very active Association of students and (2) a large number of mature students from the distance learning study programs – most of these students are currently employed and/or have graduated another Faculty (some of them are also holders of PhD titles). Based on the literature review, we discuss here the possibilities to include these two categories of students in the Quality Assurance program of the Faculty, in terms of establishing their role as active agents of the QA process. These strategies should be based on the facts that: (1) the members of the Student Association have the potential to develop themselves as a culture with standards and values in the area QA at Faculty level, and (2) the category of mature (adult) students could bring, in a structured manner, an important insight to the other types of students at levels of career orientation, work-related expectations and humane-abilities development. Most important, the ideas of S-L programs implementation are analyzed from the perspective of internalization strategies of the European standards for internal quality assurance within Romanian higher education system.