Belgium's world share of science and social-science papers over the last five years, expressed as a percentage of papers in each of 21 fields in the   Thomson Reuters database. Also, Belgium's relative citation impact compared to the world average in each field, in percentage terms.

Between 2003 and 2007, Thomson Reuters indexed 60,868 papers that listed at least one author address in Belgium. Of those papers, the highest percentage appeared in journals classified under the heading of microbiology, followed by space science and plant & animal science. The impact of microbiology papers from Belgium, as the right-hand column indicates, exceeded the world average by 15% during the five-year period (8.23 cites per paper for Belgium, versus the world baseline of 7.13 cites per paper). The impact of papers from Belgium-based authors was also notably strong in clinical medicine (49% above the world average), agricultural sciences (42% above), and in ecology/environmental, engineering, and geosciences (all +32%).

SOURCE: National Science Indicators, 1981-2007 (containing listings of output and citation statistics for more than 170 countries; available in standard and deluxe versions from the Research Services Group).