  The research assessments of countries or institutions should reveal their
contribution to the advancement of science. Taking into consideration the
correlation that exists between scientific impact and number of citations,
research assessments can be based on citation counts. However, it is crucial to
perform the counts in the heavy tail of citation distributions. Following this
heavy tail approach, all measurements performed in Spanish universities show
that their research is inefficient because the proportion of highly cited
papers is much lower than in the most scientifically advanced countries. The
same conclusion is reached when considering the number of researchers in the
Ioannidis, Boyack, and Baas lists of highly cited researchers.
