Search

Indicators of research activity are suggested in order to evaluate the relative research efforts within the subfields of physics in a given country and in relation to the world average. The comparison of the internal activity indicators of various countries show that the self-regulating mechanism of scientific research tends to keep an even distribution of efforts in each of the physics subfields on a worldwide scale. Countries of high and medium economic and intellectual potential showing significant deviation in research efforts from the general group behavior were selected by an expectation methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]