The Nature Index is a database that tracks institutions and countries/territories and their scientific output since its introduction in November, 2014. [1] Originally released with 64 natural-science journals, the Nature Index expanded to 82 natural-science journals in 2018, then added 64 health-science journals in 2023. Each year, Nature Index ranks the leading institutions (which can be companies, universities, government agencies, research institutes, or NGOs) and countries by the number of scientific articles and papers published in leading journals. This ranking can also be categorized by individual fields of research such as life sciences, chemistry, physics, or earth sciences, with different institutions leading in each. The Nature Index was conceived by Nature Portfolio. In total, more than 17,000 institutions are listed in the Nature Index.
The Nature Index attempts to objectively measure the scientific output of institutions and countries, taking into account differences in quality. Therefore, only articles published in 145 selected high-quality journals are counted. These journals were selected by independent committees. If authors from several institutions and/or countries are involved in a scientific article, it is divided accordingly, assuming that all researchers were equally involved in the article. For example, this "fractional count" (Share) received by each author would be 0.1 for an article with 10 authors. If an author is affiliated with more than one institution, that author's Share is then subdivided equally across their affiliated institutions. The process is similar for countries/territories and regions, though the fact that some institutions have overseas labs makes the process more complicated, with such labs being counted towards their appropriate host countries. [2] [3]
The top 25 institutions with the highest share of articles published in scientific journals according to the Nature Index 2023, which is valid for the calendar year 2022: [4]
The top 25 countries with the highest share of articles published in scientific journals according to the Nature Index 2023, which is valid for the calendar year 2022. [5]
Rank | Country | Total share |
---|---|---|
1 | United States | 21.473% |
2 | China | 20.051% |
3 | Germany | 4.555% |
4 | United Kingdom | 3.967% |
5 | Japan | 2.960% |
6 | France | 2.316% |
7 | Canada | 1.791% |
8 | South Korea | 1.635% |
9 | Switzerland | 1.421% |
10 | Australia | 1.373% |
11 | India | 1.280% |
12 | Italy | 1.267% |
13 | Spain | 1.219% |
14 | Netherlands | 1.116% |
15 | Sweden | 0.800% |
16 | Israel | 0.661% |
17 | Denmark | 0.575% |
18 | Singapore | 0.551% |
19 | Taiwan | 0.453% |
20 | Russia | 0.448% |
21 | Belgium | 0.446% |
22 | Austria | 0.425% |
23 | Brazil | 0.328% |
24 | Poland | 0.297% |
25 | Finland | 0.269% |
In academic publishing, scientific journal is a periodical publication designed to further the progress of science by disseminating new research findings to the scientific community. These journals serve as a platform for researchers, scholars, and scientists to share their latest discoveries, insights, and methodologies across a multitude of scientific disciplines. Unlike professional or trade magazines, scientific journals are characterized by their rigorous peer-review process, which aims to ensure the validity, reliability, and quality of the published content. With origins dating back to the 17th century, the publication of scientific journals has evolved significantly, playing a pivotal role in the advancement of scientific knowledge, fostering academic discourse, and facilitating collaboration within the scientific community.
Nature is a British weekly scientific journal founded and based in London, England. As a multidisciplinary publication, Nature features peer-reviewed research from a variety of academic disciplines, mainly in science and technology. It has core editorial offices across the United States, continental Europe, and Asia under the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature. Nature was one of the world's most cited scientific journals by the Science Edition of the 2022 Journal Citation Reports, making it one of the world's most-read and most prestigious academic journals. As of 2012, it claimed an online readership of about three million unique readers per month.
Academic publishing is the subfield of publishing which distributes academic research and scholarship. Most academic work is published in academic journal articles, books or theses. The part of academic written output that is not formally published but merely printed up or posted on the Internet is often called "grey literature". Most scientific and scholarly journals, and many academic and scholarly books, though not all, are based on some form of peer review or editorial refereeing to qualify texts for publication. Peer review quality and selectivity standards vary greatly from journal to journal, publisher to publisher, and field to field.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences is the national academy for natural sciences and the highest consultancy for science and technology of the People's Republic of China. It is the world's largest research organization, with 100 research institutes, 2 universities, 69 thousand full-time employees, and 79 thousand graduate students.
College and university rankings order institutions in higher education based on factors that vary depending on the ranking. Some rankings evaluate institutions within a single country, while others assess institutions worldwide. Rankings are typically conducted by magazines, newspapers, websites, governments, or academics. In addition to ranking entire institutions, specific programs, departments, and schools can be ranked. Some rankings consider measures of wealth, excellence in research, selective admissions, and alumni success. Rankings may also consider various combinations of measures of specialization expertise, student options, award numbers, internationalization, graduate employment, industrial linkage, historical reputation and other criteria.
The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) was an academic publishing service, founded by Eugene Garfield in Philadelphia in 1956. ISI offered scientometric and bibliographic database services. Its specialty was citation indexing and analysis, a field pioneered by Garfield.
The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as indexed by Clarivate's Web of Science.
Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in documents. It uses the directed graph of citations — links from one document to another document — to reveal properties of the documents. A typical aim would be to identify the most important documents in a collection. A classic example is that of the citations between academic articles and books. For another example, judges of law support their judgements by referring back to judgements made in earlier cases. An additional example is provided by patents which contain prior art, citation of earlier patents relevant to the current claim. The digitization of patent data and increasing computing power have led to a community of practice that uses these citation data to measure innovation attributes, trace knowledge flows, and map innovation networks.
The Homi Bhabha National Institute (HBNI) is an Indian deemed university established by the Department of Atomic Energy, which unifies academic programmes of several of its constituent institutions. Deemed universities in India have been divided in three categories by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) and HBNI has been placed in category 'A', highest of the three categories. Homi Bhabha National Institute, Mumbai and its Constituent Units are the institutions of excellence as per section 4(b) of "The Central Education Institutions Act, 2006".
Nature Portfolio is a division of the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature that publishes academic journals, magazines, online databases, and services in science and medicine.
Citation impact or citation rate is a measure of how many times an academic journal article or book or author is cited by other articles, books or authors. Citation counts are interpreted as measures of the impact or influence of academic work and have given rise to the field of bibliometrics or scientometrics, specializing in the study of patterns of academic impact through citation analysis. The importance of journals can be measured by the average citation rate, the ratio of number of citations to number articles published within a given time period and in a given index, such as the journal impact factor or the citescore. It is used by academic institutions in decisions about academic tenure, promotion and hiring, and hence also used by authors in deciding which journal to publish in. Citation-like measures are also used in other fields that do ranking, such as Google's PageRank algorithm, software metrics, college and university rankings, and business performance indicators.
The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The h-index correlates with success indicators such as winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The index has more recently been applied to the productivity and impact of a scholarly journal as well as a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country. The index was suggested in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UC San Diego, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.
Shenzhen University (SZU) is a municipal public research university in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. The university is funded by the Shenzhen Municipal People's Government.
The University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is a public university headquartered in Shijingshan, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The university is part of the Double First-Class Construction. Officially established in 2012, the university derives from the Graduate School of the University of Science and Technology of China founded in 1978.
Data sharing is the practice of making data used for scholarly research available to other investigators. Many funding agencies, institutions, and publication venues have policies regarding data sharing because transparency and openness are considered by many to be part of the scientific method.
Academic authorship of journal articles, books, and other original works is a means by which academics communicate the results of their scholarly work, establish priority for their discoveries, and build their reputation among their peers.
Today in China, there are more than 8,000 academic journals, of which more than 4,600 can be considered scientific. About 1,400 cover health science. In 2022, it was reported that China has become one of the top countries in the world in both scientific research output, and also for highly cited academic papers.
In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional bibliometrics proposed as an alternative or complement to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.
Author-level metrics are citation metrics that measure the bibliometric impact of individual authors, researchers, academics, and scholars. Many metrics have been developed that take into account varying numbers of factors.