Digital Science partners with Springer Nature on Nature Index
Springer Nature is collaborating with Digital Science, a leader in scholarly technology, on the compilation of the Nature Index
This release was originally posted by Digital Science on 12 December 2019
London | Sydney, 12 December 2019
The Nature Index is a database of author affiliations and institutional relationships compiled by Nature Research, tracking roughly 60,000 research articles per year from 82 high-quality natural science journals. It provides absolute and fractional counts of article publication at the institutional and national level and, as such, is an indicator of high quality research output and collaboration at the global and local level.
In 2019, for the first time, the Nature Index also included a normalized ranking tracked using Digital Science’s Dimensions database. This takes into account the number of high-quality articles published as a proportion of an institute’s overall output in the natural sciences.
The 2019 annual tables showed the United States to be well ahead of China, while the top three institutions included the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Harvard University, and the Max Planck Society. However, the new normalized rankings revealed a very different set of leaders among academic institutions with the top three including Cold Harbor Laboratory in the US, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
As part of the collaboration, Digital Science’s Dimensions team will be taking over the data management of the index, which is updated monthly, and a 12-month window of data will continue to be made openly available at natureindex.com. Nature Index journals now also sit in Dimensions as a filter option in the journal list. This collaboration will enable the Nature Index to strengthen its interactions with the Dimensions database, while providing the database with continuous high quality data from Dimensions’ extensive database.
David Swinbanks, Founder of the Nature Index, said: “This collaboration is a very natural fit. The Dimensions and Nature Index databases together make a very powerful combination that will be stronger than the sum of its parts”
