The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is the world’s highest ranked research institution, according to the Nature Index Annual Tables 2019 released on June 20. It has been No. 1 on the list for seven straight years.

The latest Nature Index is based on the data in 2018 from Jan 1 to Dec 31. The tables showed that CAS stood out among science and technology research institutions throughout the world, while Harvard University, the German Max Planck Society, the French National Center for Scientific Research and Stanford University ranked from second to fifth in sequence.

Meanwhile, CAS topped the categories of physical sciences, chemistry and Earth studies and environmental sciences. Its life sciences ranked fifth this year, up from sixth last year.

Forty-three American research institutions and 17 from China are listed among the world’s top 100 research institutions; the top Chinese research institutions on the list include CAS (1st), Peking University (10th), Tsinghua University (13th), Nanjing University (15th), the University of Science and Technology of China (17th), the University of CAS (24th), Zhejiang University (27th), Fudan University (34th), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (41st) and Nankai University (51st).

While the United States reigns over the countries’ ranks, the Nature Index’s data shows China and Germany ranking after it in second and third places. Among the top 10 countries, only China and Australia achieved positive growth in research output, according to the new fractional count (FC).

Forty-three of China’s institutions have ranked in the top 50 in terms of FC growth rate in the past three years. The University of CAS, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tsinghua University, Nanjing University and Sichuan University are the top five highest-ranked Chinese candidates.

China remains number one in chemical scientific research. Five of the top 10 contributors to chemistry research output are from China: CAS, Nanjing University, Peking University, Tsinghua University and USTC.

The ranking of a college’s research institutions after normalized computing debuted in this year’s Nature Index Tables. This ranking considers the number of an institution’s high-quality research papers as a proportion of its overall output in the natural sciences.

The Natural Index was first published in November 2014, and the number of journals included in its statistics is 82. It applies multiple methods to evaluate productivity and quality. An institution or a country is given an article count (AC) for each article that has at least one author from that institution or the country. FC is assigned based on the sum of contributions to articles of authors affiliated with each country’s institutions.

Source: China Daily