The Nature Publication Index

Nature has long been regarded as the best or one of the two best scientific journals in the world. Papers published there and in Science  account for 20 % of the weighting for Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking of World Universities, the same as Nobel and Fields awards or publications in the whole of the Science Citation and Social Science Citation Indexes.

Sceptics may wonder whether Nature has seen better years and is perhaps sliding away from the pinnacle of scientific publishing. It has had some embarrassing moments in recent decades including the publication of a 1978 paper that gave credence to the alleged abilities of the psychic Uri Geller, the report of a study by Jacques Beneviste and others that purported to show that water has a memory. the questionable "hockey stick" article on global warming in 1998 and seven retracted papers on superconductivity by Jan Hendrik Schon.

But it still seems that Nature is highly regarded by the global scientific community and that the recent publication of the Nature Publication Index is a reasonable guide to current trends in scientific research. This counts the number of publications in Nature in 2013.

The USA remains on top with Harvard first, MIT second and Stanford third although China continues to make rapid progress. For many parts of the world, Latin America, Southern Europe, Africa, scientific achievement is extremely limited. Looking at the Asia-Pacific rankings  much of the region including Indonesia, Bangladesh and the Philippines is almost a scientific desert.