The paper presents the results describing the research productivity in the area of economics in 36 European countries in the period 2011–2020. During the first stage of the research, the publications’ distributions over the structure of authors’ teams, over the contribution of foreign co-authors and over main research topics mentioned in papers were analyzed. Also the impact of mentioned above features on the number of citations was studied. The authors tested the possibility of building a recommendation system indicating the best way of preparing scientific publications with respect to the number of citations. The results show that the prediction of the exact number of citation is rather impossible, but the main determinants may be identified. The set of the most important factors having a huge impact on the citation measures involves the research experience of authors confirmed by previous publications, the structure of authors’ teams, the degree of their internationalization and proper selection of research topics belong to the group of main success factors in publication activity.