Academy tops Nature Index for sixth year

The Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing is top among the world’s leading institutions for high-quality scientific research, according to the Nature Index 2018 annual tables released on Thursday.

It is the sixth consecutive year the academy successfully defended its title at the top of the table, according to the academy’s official website.

Also included in the top 10 are Max Planck Society, French National Centre for Scientific Research, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers, University of Tokyo, University of California Berkeley and the University of Cambridge.

China’s Peking University and Tsinghua University made it into the global academic top 10 for the specific sector of academic institutions.

Among the leading 100 academic institutions in the 2018 annual tables, 44 are from the US and 16 from China. Britain and Japan contributed seven each, with six from Germany, four from Switzerland and three from Canada, according to the index.

The Nature Index is a database of author affiliation information collated from research articles published in an independently selected group of 82 high-quality science journals, compiled by Nature Research.

The global picture is changing, and Chinese institutions are gaining their place, Nature Index quoted Marijk van der Wende, a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, as saying.