The use of deciles of the citation impact to evaluate different fields of research in Israel

One often uses the average citation impact factor in order to perform international comparisons between the levels of scientific performance within given disciplines. In averaging over all (or all cited) papers one may give undue weight to papers with few citations while, in fact, the standing of a country within a given field would be better assessed by looking only at the "successful" papers in that discipline. The present papers suggests that one should do so by averaging citations only over the ten (or twenty) percent of the most cited papers in a discipline and use these in order to establish a ranking between countries. The case of Israel is used as an illustration of this approach.