Singapore, Mar 11, 2010: Japan, China, and Australia have ranked top in the Nature Asia-Pacific Publishing Index, a website which measures the annual output of research articles in Nature-branded journals from countries and institutions in the Asia-Pacific region.

India figures at number six among the eleven Asia-Pacific countries.

The Nature Asia-Pacific publishing index, however, has some good news for India – the number of papers published in Nature journals from the country have gone up from just two in 1998 to 18 in 2009, a sharp increase.

The Publishing Index tracks research published from the Asia-Pacific region during the past 12 months in NPG's portfolio of over 30 highly cited Nature-branded journals, and will be updated weekly by downloading a 12-month window of data from nature.com, the online platform for Nature journals.

India's science hub from down south tops the list from the country with the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore ranking highest at number 53 and Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad at 76. NCBS has one paper in Nature Nanotechnology fully authored by its own scientists and so it ranks higher than the coveted Indian Institute of Science (IIS), Bangalore which has four papers though all authors are not from IIS.

The east also figures prominently with two research bodies from Kolkata – the Bose Institute, and the Indian Association for Cultivation of Science – at ranks 77 and 80 respectively.

A special report accompanying the publication of the index notes that that though India is somewhat overshadowed by the spectacular rise of neighboring China, the emergence of India as a scientific and technological power has not gone unnoticed either in the region or globally.

While the contribution of the scientists from the subcontinent to Nature journals is still relatively modest in terms of the absolute number of papers, the trend is sharply upward. Since 1998, the number of articles published in Nature journals by Indian scientists has increased by a factor of nine, with representations from 24 Indian institutions in 2009, the report says.

India's research strength, as seen in the Index, is evenly balanced between the physical and life sciences. "…There are many who believe that just as the first ten years of the twenty-first century in the Asia-Pacific belonged to China, the second decade may well be India's," it points out.

In 2009, 232 original articles from Japanese institutions were published in Nature and the Nature Research journals. 93 articles came from Chinese institutions, and 98 from Australian institutions. When corrected for the percentage of authors on the papers from a given country, Japan ranks first, China second, Australia third. Korea and Singapore also performed strongly with India beginning to emerge as a significant player.

The data demonstrates the recent strong growth in output of high quality scientific research from China and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In 1998, China published just three articles in Nature and the Nature Research journals and, while the number of Nature-branded primary research journals has since doubled, the number of articles from China has increased 30 fold

At an institutional level, six of the top ten institutions in the 2009 rankings are in Japan. The University of Tokyo leads the table with 68 articles, followed by Kyoto University, Osaka University, RIKEN and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The Index only covers Nature and the Nature research journals, so while it offers broad coverage of basic research in the life sciences, physical and chemical sciences, coverage of applied sciences, engineering and clinical medicine is relatively limited, and so the index should be used primarily as an indicator of strength in high quality basic research.

"We are delighted to be launching the index which is updated weekly alongside the print supplement that summarizes results for 2009" says David Swinbanks, NPG Publishing Director for the Asia-Pacific region.

"With the index users can drill down to find the abstracts of papers on which the index rankings are based and the weekly updating provides a means to keep track of where and in what fields and from which institutions and individual researchers some of the hottest basic research in the region is emerging."

"The index is fully transparent and institutions, countries and individual researchers are free to use the data on the website for their own analysis and interpretations provided they acknowledge and link to the source."