NPG Nature Asia-Pacific, the Asia-Pacific wing of Nature Publishing Group (NPG), has launched Nature Asia-Pacific Publishing Index, a website which measures the annual output of research articles in Nature-branded journals from countries and institutions in the Asia-Pacific region. The online service is available at www.natureasia.com/en/publishing-index/.
Japan, China, and Australia are the top ranking nations in the Nature Asia-Pacific Publishing Index. The Publishing Index tracks research published from the Asia-Pacific region during the past 12 months in NPG's portfolio of over 30 highly cited Nature-branded journals, and will be updated weekly by downloading a 12-month window of data from nature.com, the online platform for Nature journals. The Index only covers Nature and the Nature Research journals. While it offers broad coverage of basic research in the life sciences, physical and chemical sciences, coverage of applied sciences, engineering and clinical medicine is relatively limited.
To celebrate the launch of this new service, a special print supplement Nature Asia-Pacific Publishing Ranking 2009 has been included with the latest print copy of Nature. The rankings are based on data drawn from the website for the period January to December 2009.
The Nature Asia-Pacific Publishing Index website enables users to analyse data by institution, country or Nature journal, and access historical data and graphs dating back to 1998. In 2009, 232 original articles from Japanese institutions were published in Nature and the Nature Research journals. 93 articles came from Chinese institutions, and 98 from Australian institutions. When corrected for the percentage of authors on the papers from a given country, Japan ranked first followed by China and Australia. Korea and Singapore also performed strongly with India beginning to emerge as a significant player.
The data demonstrates the recent strong growth in output of high quality scientific research from China and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In 1998, China published just three articles in Nature and the Nature Research journals and, while the number of Nature-branded primary research journals has since doubled, the number of articles from China has increased 30 fold.
At an institutional level, six of the top ten institutions in the 2009 rankings are in Japan. The University of Tokyo leads the table with 68 articles, followed by Kyoto University, Osaka University, RIKEN and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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