Israeli research institutes: A dynamic and evaluative perspective

This paper introduces a dynamic perspective on institutional research performance that can be used for evaluative purposes. It combines four principles: importance of national situation; evolution data; multiple indicators and similar institutes. The perspective is applied to five Israeli research institutes and as such it also follows up earlier studies of Israel's changing research landscape. First several bibliometric indicators for Israel are presented. Then these institutes were classified according to their research profile and their scores over a publication period of 17 years are calculated. Their quintile rank position compared to European research institutes is presented. We conclude that the Israeli institutes publish papers that attract more citations than the field average. They also tend to publish in journals with a higher citation impact than the field. But because of their choice of journals it often difficult to reach the citation average set by this journal. [Table 7 corrected in January 2010.].