Sophisticated science in a small country: A scientometric analysis of superconductivity research in Israel

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Abstract
Small countries practising science rarely graduate to the level of performing quality research in sophisticated areas. Viewed on this background, an analysis of 130 papers on superconductivity published by Israeli researchers and indexed in Physics Abstracts 1971-1982 reveal that Israel does pretty well in this area. Prolific institutions and authors have been identified as well as journals most often used, highly cited papers, etc. Many of the papers appeared in high impact international journals, with Physical Review B (26), Journal of Low Temperature Physics (11) and Solid State Communications (10) leading the field. Among the five institutions active in the area, Tel Aviv University (68) accounts for more than half of Israel's publication output. Hebrew University (32) and Tech nion Institute of Technology (22) are the other major centres of research in superconductivity. Five of the 130 papers have won more than 20 citations each up to 1982, and 22 papers more than 10 citations. Israeli papers in superconductivity seem to belong to the mainstream literature in the area as seen from their decent citation record, which is better than that of Canada and almost close to that of the USA. Most of these papers are theoretical/computational and about 30% of them are experi mental.