Science in a small country at a time of globalisation: domestic and international collaboration in new biology research in Israel

Abstract

From an analysis of papers indexed in three years of Biochemistry and Biophysics Citation Index (1992, 1995 and 1998), it is found that 103 institutions in Israel have published 4,112 papers in more than 990 journals and 64 non-journal sources published from 27 countries. More than 16% of papers have appeared in journals with an impact factor (IF) higher than 7.00 and an equal fraction of papers have appeared in journals with an IF of less than 1.00. The sum of the IFs of the journals in which papers have been published has been used as a rough measure to quantify each institution’s research contribution. Hebrew University, the Weizmann Institute and Tel Aviv University are the institutions publishing the largest number of papers, while Rehovot and Jerusalem are the leading cities. Journal of Biological Chemistry, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - USA, FEBS Letters and Biochemistry are the journals most often used by Israeli researchers to publish their work. To overcome the problems of conducting world-class research in a small country, Israel uses collaboration with overseas laboratories to great advantage. More than 42% of papers in the sample involve international collaboration; half of them with laboratories in the USA and some with Germany, France, the UK and Canada. Over 10% of papers have resulted from domestic collaboration. In general, internationally collaborated papers are published in higher-impact journals, but domestically collaborated papers more often appear in lower-impact journals than single-institution papers. While the USA remains the most important partner of Israel, papers co-authored with French and UK collaborators raise the IF value of Israeli contributions more than those with other partner countries.