Out of 150 countries Australia is placed 12th for its contribution to high-quality scientific research papers, according to new Nature Index Tables.
The Nature Index is built on an institution’s contributions to about 60,000 high-quality papers each year and counts both the number of papers and the relative contribution of the authors*. The Nature Index Tables published in April show these outputs for the last four years.
It reveals that Australia is just ahead of India and three places behind South Korea. The US leads the index, followed by China, Germany, the UK and Japan.
In Australia, the members of the Group of Eight fill the top eight positions, with The University of Queensland leading at 89 on the global university list. Monash University is 93 globally, the Australian National University is at 100, and The University of Melbourne at 130.
The University of Melbourne researchers were listed as authors on 164 more papers than their Queensland peers, however The University of Queensland had greater ownership of their papers – fewer authors from other institutions – bringing them to the top of the index in terms of contribution to the articles.
The good news for The University of Melbourne is that the index shows it is more collaborative than its rival.
Australia has eleven universities in the top 500 institutions in the index, which tracks over 8,000 institutions worldwide.
The CSIRO is not included in the list of universities. Its weighted index contribution is about half that of the top three Australian universities, placing it seventh amongst all Australian institutions in the index. Its contribution has been flat over the past four years.
Globally, Harvard University is the leading university followed by Stanford University, The University of Tokyo and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But the main message is that China's investment in science is paying dividends: Between 2012 and 2015, China’s contribution to the Nature Index grew by an annual average of 12.8%. By comparison, Australia's contribution grew by an average 3.3% over the same period.
*The tables reveal absolute publication productivity in broad subject areas for countries, universities, companies and hospitals. Measures include article count (AC), the total number of affiliated articles; fractional count (FC), which accounts for the relative contribution of each affiliation to an article; and weighted fractional count (WFC), which applies a weighting to FC to adjust for imbalances in the index’s subject coverage.
The data cover 8,000 institutions from 150 countries, and are freely accessible on www.natureindex.com.