Glossary of terms | Nature Index (original) (raw)

When comparing data over time, Share values are adjusted to account for the small annual variation in the total number of articles in Nature Index journals. It's arrived by calculating the percentage difference in the total number of articles in the Index in a given year relative to the number of articles in a base year and adjusting Share values to the based year levels.

Affiliated institution

An institution that is wholly owned, operated, administered or contains research facilities for another institution. All affiliations for an affiliated institution are credited to the institution to which it is affiliated.

Affiliated joint institution

A research facility operated jointly by multiple institutions. Each partner institution of the joint institution receives an equivalent Share for every affiliation in which the joint institution is included.

Affiliated joint institutions and consortia

Represents joint institutions and consortia for which the institution is designated as a partner institution.

Affiliation

An affiliation as listed on a scientific paper is the institution to which an author belonged at the time the research was conducted. Each affiliation on a paper in the Nature Index scores a Count of one for the named institution.

Broadening collaborators

Inspired by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 4: Education, and 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries, broadening collaborators tracks the leading institutions collaborating with institutions located in countries/territories outside of the top 50 countries/territories in the Nature Index. The tables are determined by the total Share of collaboration with institutions located outside of the top 50 countries/territories.

Collaboration score (CS)

A collaboration can be between any two institutions or locations co-authoring at least one article in the journals tracked by the Nature Index. The collaboration score between two institutions or countries/regions is the sum of each of their Shares on the papers to which both have contributed.

Consortia

Indicates research partnerships between multiple institutions. Each partner institution of a consortium receives an equivalent Share for every affiliation in which the consortium is included. Often consortia are international and in some cases there is no home research facility.

Count

A Count of one is assigned to an institution or country/region if one or more authors of the research article are from that institution or country/region, regardless of how many co-authors there are from outside that institution or country/region.

Current Index

The ‘Current Index’ represent a dataset for a 12-month rolling window, which is updated monthly. The tables include all institutions and countries/territories with research outputs within the 12-month rolling window. The current date range is 1 February 2025 - 31 January 2026.

DOI

A digital object identifier, a unique alphanumeric string assigned by a registration agency (the International DOI Foundation) to identify content and provide a persistent link to its location on the Internet. The publisher assigns a DOI when an article is published and made available electronically.

Funding institution

An institution that funds research and is not responsible for the administration of the research or research itself. Affiliations that are deemed to be from funding institutions do not receive a Share, except where a funding institution has its own research facilities, in which cases those affiliations will receive a Share.

Outputs

The metrics referring to research articles tracked by the Nature Index for which a particular institution or country/region has at least one affiliation. An institution’s or country/region’s outputs in the Nature Index are Count and Share.

Parent institutions

A parent institution refers to the top-level organization that administratively owns or governs a research entity, under which smaller or affiliated institutions are grouped for counting and analysis purposes. Parent institutions are the primary organisational entity in the Nature Index. The Count or Share of a parent institution may include contributions from that institution’s faculties, schools, hospitals, institutes, departments or subsidiaries.

Partner institutions

The institutions that together own, operate, administer or have responsibility for research facilities and/or activities at the relevant joint institution or consortium.

Regions

Groups of countries organized into major regions of the world. In some cases, continental borders do not define a region. See here for a list of countries included in each region.

Research leaders

Formerly known as the ‘Annual tables’, the ‘Research leaders’ are a snapshot of data for one, full calendar year, listing the leading institutions and countries/territories by region, sector, and broad subject area.

Sectors

Institutions in the Nature Index are categorized according to five sectors. They are

• Academic - an institution dedicated to education and research, which grants academic degrees (e.g. university)
• Corporate - a company or group of people authorized to act as a single entity (legally a person), recognized as such in law, with the goal to earn profit. (Independent) consultants are also considered as corporate.
• Government - A government-funded organization with the primary mission of performing or promoting basic research and/or applied research.
• Healthcare - Nature Index uses the United Nations' International Standard Industrial Classification as a basic framework for defining the institutions in the healthcare sector. The UN categorizes health care as generally consisting of hospital activities, medical and dental practice activities, and "other human health activities". The last class involves activities of, or under the supervision of, nurses, midwives, physiotherapists, scientific or diagnostic laboratories, pathology clinics, residential health facilities, or other allied health professions, e.g. in the field of optometry, hydrotherapy, medical massage, yoga therapy, music therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, chiropody, homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, etc.
• NPO/NGO - a non-profit organization (NPO) uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals rather than distributing them as profit or dividends. A non-governmental organization (NGO) refers to an organization that is neither a part of a government nor a conventional for-profit business. Both NGOs and NPOs may be funded by governments, foundations, businesses, or private persons.

A fractional count allocated to an institution or country/region for an article that takes into account the percentage of authors from that institution or country/region and the number of affiliated institutions that contributed to the article. For calculation of Share, all authors are considered to have contributed equally to the article. The maximum combined Share for any article is 1.0.

A Share of 1 can be interpreted either as a publication that is wholly authored by researchers affiliated to the institution, or their Share of authorships sum to one over several publications.

Here are some examples:

• An article is authored by one author affiliated to one university -> university Share is 1
• An article is authored by one author affiliated to a joint institution -> each partner institution of the joint institution has a Share of 0.5
• An article is authored by five authors affiliated to five different universities -> each university has a Share of 0.2
• An article is authored by five authors, 4 are affiliated to the same university -> one university has a Share of 0.8, the other 0.2

Subject areas

Research articles are assigned to subjects based on the Nature Research Intelligence Topic associated with each article. ANZSRC fields of research codes were linked to Nature Index disciplines to allow for the categorization of each article. All fields of research are linked to a subject/discipline. ([Discipline mapping](/nature-index/applied-sciences/methodology##researchDiscipline }}))

Topics

The Nature Research Intelligence Topics are created from networks of articles that cite each other, or articles that are very similar to each other, and we have over 41K topics at the most granular level, grouped into a 4-level hierarchy. On the Nature Index we show topics from the 2nd level of the hierarchy that have enough articles to provide insights on the topic data. For more granular topics we show topic summary and some data insights from all publications.

Umbrella organisation

Large, non-university organisations (typically academies, societies, associations and government agencies) that administer multiple, independent institutes within a hierarchy. Members of umbrella organisations are included within the Nature Index both individually and as part of the umbrella organisation.