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

From an analysis of papers indexed in three years of Biochemistry and Bioph ysics Citation Index (1992, 1995 and 1998), it is found that 103 institutio ns in Israel have published 4,112 papers in more than 990 journals and 64 n on-journal sources published from 27 countries. More than 16% of papers hav e appeared in journals with an impact factor (IF) higher than 7.00 and an e qual fraction of papers have appeared in journals with an LF 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 c ontribution. Hebrew University, the Weizmann Institute and Tel Aviv Univers ity are the institutions publishing the largest number of papers, while Reh ovot and Jerusalem are the leading cities. Journal of Biological Chemistry, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - USA, FEES Letters and Bi ochemistry are the journals most often used by Israeli researchers to publi sh their work. To overcome the problems of conducting world-class research in a small country, Israel uses collaboration. with overseas laboratories t o great advantage. More than 42% of papers in the sample involve internatio nal 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 d omestic collaboration. In general, internationally collaborated papers are published in higher-impact journals, but domestically collaborated papers m ore often appear in lower-impact journals than single-institution papers, W hile the USA remains the most important partner of Israel, papers co-author ed with French and UK collaborators raise the IF value of Israeli contribut ions more than those with other partner countries.