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.