I am very happy that an Israeli scientist has been awarded the prestigious Nobel price. It makes me proud to be an Israeli too. This makes me also wonder what was so special thirty years ago that allowed Israel to collect several of these awards during the last decade. I decided to make a little comparison of the state of the Israel's science today and thirty years ago. I used Scopus  research engine, a pretty exhaustive source of scientific citations, to see how many papers associated with Israeli institutions have been published in the last 30 days and compared this number with one-month worth of publications in 1980 in Israel and other leading countries. In order to provide a fair comparison with other countries and between different time points I divided the numbers by the population size so the results below represent a monthly number of publications per 1 million inhabitants.

To see the citation tables for 2011 and 1980 press here


These results show that Israel is loosing it's place as a leader of the scientific community. Although, in terms of the number of publications, Israel is still comparable with an average European country, the trend is worrisome. Israel retreated from a position of the "light upon the nations" to mediocrity. In 30 years it has increased its scientific outputs by several hundred percents, while the leading nations have done so by thousand percents, leaving Israel far behind.

However, the real increase in the scientific productivity is not reflected in these numbers. It comes from the developing countries that have, for now, a comparatively low per capita contribution. However, in gross numbers these countries are fast becoming the next powerhouses of science. China's scientific output is only marginally smaller than that of the US and is far ahead of any other country. No doubt it will soon overtake the US as being a leading publisher of the scientific papers. Other developing countries, such as Turkey and Iran, are growing constantly. In terms of the total number of publications they have overcome Israel several years ago and will soon overcome even larger Western nations.

This all means that to stay relevant Israel should increase amount of resource and the efficiency of their use. Otherwise very soon the technological edge will be in other people's hands. Judging by the state of the Israeli science today, this Nobel flourishing of the Israel's science may very well be its Indian summer.