The Weizmann Institute of Science, in Rehovot, was praised by Scientist Magazine in its annual survey of thousands of academic workplaces.
It came top in the list of international academic institutions, above the university of St Andrews and Groningen University in the Netherlands.
The institute, founded in 1934 by future Israeli President Chaim Weizmann, hosts around 25 high-profile conferences every year.
Ada Yonath, the Israeli scientist who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2009, is a former student and is a faculty member.
The Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot is the best academic institution to work for outside the United States, according to the The Scientist. The New York-based monthly is a journal aimed at those who work in the life sciences.
Weizmann is the only Israeli research center on the magazine's list of the top 10 international academic institutions. Other countries represented on the list include Australia, Canada, France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Of all the non-U.S. institutions listed, Weizmann has the smallest number of full-time life science researchers - 108 - but the most scientific citations - an average of 30.47 per paper over the past decade. INRA, the French scientific institute for agricultural research that came in at No. 2, has an average of 14.24 citations in the same period, though it has more than 10 times the number of full-time researchers.