SCIENTIFIC OUTPUT OF CROATIAN UNIVERSITIES: COMPARISON WITH NEIGHBOURING COUNTRIES.

We compared the Croatian research output with the neighboring countries and the Croatian universities with the largest Slovenian, Hungarian, and Serbian universities. As far as papers listed by Social Science Citation Index are concerned, since 2000 the University of Zagreb exhibits best results in social sciences compared to the competing universities, that is not the case in "hard" sciences. For the last 12 years, only the University of Ljubljana has shown better results in total research output than the University of Zagreb. The difference in research output between the University of Zagreb and the rest of the Croatian universities has been constantly decreasing. As a case study we compare research output at Faculty of Civil Engineering on different Croatian universities. By analyzing European countries, we show a functional dependence between the gross domestic product (GDP) and the research output. From this fit we conclude that the Croatian science exhibits research output as expected for the given level of GDP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]