Calculating Growth rate

Im sure there is a better way to do this, but this is how I approached this.

Add a total for each country (you can be put it at the top), then used =max() to find teh highest value. You could build that into an index/match to find the name

So what would a sample answedr look like, and how would you calc it?

as I have the value "0" in some the filed these formulas didnt work. So I thought adding the value of "1" with the publication in each year (of each country) would be harmless!

I don't know that I would agree with this. It seems a gross misrepresentation of the data to substitute 1 where there are 0's. It seems to me that those 0's mean "no publications", and substituting "one publication" for those years is not correct. It also seems to me that we don't really have a good idea how to regress or represent the data, which makes it difficult, IMO, to even talk about how to put an unkown computation into a spreadsheet.

One question -- you use the term "growth rate" which tends to imply an exponential (y=A*exp(Bx)) type function. Are you certain that an exponential function is the most appropriate function to use here? Would other functions be more appropriate? Excel's regression functions (LINEST(), LOGEST(), GROWTH(), TREND(), etc.) can handle a wide variety of function types. The hardest part, sometimes, is deciding what function seems most correct for a given problem.

I'm simply interested to see among 20 countries I have, which one's where more successful in publication during the past years.

In many ways, it seems like your question really isn't about Excel (yet), but more about how to measure "success" in publication. If I am wrong and you do know what metric you want to use to measure "success", then explain that metric to us and we should be able to help you program that metric into Excel.

If this is more about determining what metric to use, I might suggest that we start with some of the simplest metrics:

1) Total publications. In Excel, this would be a simple =SUM() function. Of course, the question of "most successful" is "which country has the most publications?" -- A simple =MAX() function in Excel.

2) "Total publications" may be confounded by other variables. Populous countries or wealthier countries may have a natural edge using this metric. Perhaps a better metric would be "Publications per Euro spent" or "Publications per researcher" or something similar.

3) Since you introduced the idea of using "regression" techniques to this, this perhaps suggests that "more successful" is more about how each country has changed over the last 20 years, rather than total measures like the previous 2 metrics. The challenge here is that you need to choose your base metric, and then choose how to measure "change".

Just a few thoughts. Once you choose a suitable metric to measure "success", then I think we will be better able to suggest algorithms and spreadsheet programming to implement those algorithms.