The Nature Index is a database of author affiliations and institutional relationships. The index tracks contributions to research articles published in high-quality natural-science and health-science journals, chosen based on reputation by an independent group of researchers.
The Nature Index provides absolute and fractional counts of article publication at the institutional and national level and, as such, is an indicator of global high-quality research output and collaboration. Data in the Nature Index are updated regularly, with the most recent 12 months made available under a Creative Commons licence at natureindex.com. The database is compiled by Nature Portfolio.
Nature Index metrics
The Nature Index uses Count and Share to track research output. A country/territory or an institution is given a Count of 1 for each article that has at least one author from that country/territory or institution. This is the case regardless of the number of authors an article has, and it means that the same article can contribute to the Count of multiple countries/territories or institutions.
Nature Index 2024 Health sciences
To glean a country’s, territory’s, region’s or an institution’s contribution to an article, and to ensure that they are not counted more than once, the Nature Index uses Share, a fractional count that takes into account the share of authorship on each article. The total Share available per article is 1, which is shared among all authors under the assumption that each contributed equally. For instance, an article with 10 authors means that each author receives a Share of 0.1. For authors who are affiliated with more than one institution, the author’s Share is split equally between each institution. The total Share for an institution is calculated by summing the Share for individual affiliated authors. The process is similar for countries/territories, although complicated by the fact that some institutions have overseas labs that will be counted towards host country/territory totals.
Adjusted Share accounts for the small annual variation in the total number of articles in the Nature Index journals. It is arrived at 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 base year levels.
The bilateral collaboration score (CS) between two institutions A+B is the sum of each of their Shares on the papers to which both have contributed. A bilateral collaboration can be between any two institutions or countries/territories co-authoring at least one article in the journals tracked by the Nature Index.
NATUREINDEX.COM
natureindex.com users can search for specific institutions or countries and generate their own reports, ordered by Count or Share.
Each query will return a profile page that lists the country or institution’s recent outputs, from which it is possible to drill down for more information. Articles can be displayed by journal, and then by article. Research outputs are organized by subject area. The pages list the institution or country’s/territory’s top collaborators, as well as its relationship with other organizations. Users can track an institution’s performance over time, create their own indexes and export table data.
This supplement
The Nature Index 2024 Health sciences supplement is based on the Nature Index database. It includes Nature Index articles in 65 health-science journals as well as health-sciences articles in five multidisciplinary journals published between January 2022 and July 2023.
The list of health-science journals was determined by a panel of independent clinical researchers and informed by a global survey of the wider research community. The same method was used for the original list when Nature Index launched in 2014 and for when the journal list was last reviewed in 2018.
The tables in this supplement show the leading institutions and countries overall, ranked by their article Share (Share) in health sciences between January 2022 and July 2023, as well as the leading institutions in each sector based on the same metric. The leading institutional collaborations based on bilateral collaboration score (CS) are also included.
Women and early-career researchers: Nature wants to publish your research.Credit: Getty
Researchers submitting original research to Nature over the past year will have noticed an extra question, asking them to self-report their gender. Today, as part of our commitment to helping to make science more equitable, we are publishing in this editorial a preliminary analysis of the resulting data, from almost 5,000 papers submitted to this journal over a five-month period. As well as showing the gender split in submissions, we also reveal, for the first time, possible interactions between the gender of the corresponding author and a paper’s chance of publication.
The data make for sobering reading. One stark finding is how few women are submitting research to Nature as corresponding authors. Corresponding authors are the researchers who take responsibility for a manuscript during the publication process. In many fields, this role is undertaken by some of the most experienced members of the team.
The giant plan to track diversity in research journals
During the period analysed, some 10% of corresponding authors preferred not to disclose their gender. Of the remainder, just 17% identified as women — barely an increase on the 16% we found in 2018, albeit using a less precise methodology. By comparison, women made up 31.7% of all researchers globally in 2021, according to figures from the United Nations science, education and cultural organization UNESCO (see go.nature.com/3wgdasb).
Large geographical differences were also laid bare. Women made up just 4% of corresponding authors of known gender from Japanese institutions. Of researchers from the two countries submitting the most papers, China and the United States, women made up 11% and 22%, respectively. These figures reflect the fact that women’s representation in research drops at the most senior levels. They also mirror available data from other journals1, although it is hard to find direct comparisons for a multidisciplinary journal such as Nature.
At Cell, which has a life-sciences focus, women submitted 17% of manuscripts between 2017 and 2021, according to an analysis of almost 13,000 submissions2. The most recent data on gender from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes the six journals in the Science family, is collected and reported differently. Some 27% of their authors of primary and commissioned content, and their reviewers, are women, according to the AAAS Inclusive Excellence Report (see go.nature.com/3t6yyr8). Nonetheless, all of these figures are just too low.
Another area of concern is acceptance rates. Of the submissions included in the current Nature analysis, those with women as the corresponding author were accepted for publication at a slightly lower rate than were those authored by men. Some 8% of women’s papers were accepted (58 out of 726 submissions) compared with 9% of men’s papers (320 out of 3,522 submissions). The acceptance rate for people self-reporting as non-binary or gender diverse seemed to be lower, at 3%, although this is a preliminary figure and we have reason to suspect that the real figure could be higher, as described below. Once we have a larger sample, we plan to test whether the differences are statistically significant.
Sources of imbalance
So, at what stage in the publishing process is this imbalance introduced? Men and women seem to be treated equally when papers are selected for review. The journal’s editors — a group containing slightly more women than men — were just as likely to send papers out for peer review for women corresponding authors as they were for men. For both groups, 17% of submitted papers went for peer review.
Our efforts to diversify Nature’s journalism are progressing, but work remains
A difference arose after that. Of those papers sent for review, 46% of papers with women as corresponding authors were accepted for publication (58 of 125) compared with 55% (320 of 586) of papers authored by men. The acceptance rate for non-binary and gender-diverse authors was higher at 67%. However, this is from a total of only three reviewed papers, a figure that is too small to be meaningful.
This difference in acceptance rates during review tallies with the findings of a much larger 2018 study of 25 Nature-family journals, which used a name-matching algorithm, rather than self-reported data3. Looking at 17,167 papers sent for review over a 2-year period, the authors found a smaller but significant difference in acceptance rates, with 43% for papers with a woman as corresponding author, compared with 45% for a man. However, they were unable to say whether the difference was attributable to reviewer bias or variations in manuscript quality.
Peering into peer review
How much bias exists in the peer-review process is difficult to study and has long been the subject of debate. A 2021 study in Science Advances that looked at 1.7 million authors across 145 journals between 2010 and 2016 found that, overall, the peer-review and editorial processes did not penalize manuscripts by women4. But that study analysed journals with lower citation rates than Nature, and its results contrast with those of previous work5, which found gender-based skews.
Moreover, other studies have shown that people rate men’s competence more highly than women’s when assessing identical job applications6; that there is a gender bias against women in citations; and that women are given less credit for their work than are men7. Taken together, this means we cannot assume that peer review is a gender-blind process. Most papers in our current study were not anonymized. We did not share how the authors self-reported, but editors or reviewers might have inferred gender from a corresponding author’s name. Nature has offered double-anonymized peer review for both authors and reviewers since 2015. Too few take it up for us to have been able to examine its impact in this analysis, but the larger study in 2018 looked at this in detail3.
Data limitations
There are important limitations to Nature’s data: we must emphasize again that they are preliminary. Moreover, they provide the gender of only one corresponding author per paper, not the gender distribution of a paper’s full author list. Furthermore, they don’t describe any other differences between authors.
There are also aspects of the data that need to be investigated further. For example, we need to look into the possibility that the option of reporting as non-binary or gender diverse is being misinterpreted by some authors with English as a second language. We think that ironing out such misunderstandings could result in a higher acceptance rate for non-binary authors.
Nature’s under-representation of women
Most importantly, these data give no insight into author experiences in relation to race, ethnicity and socio-economic status. Although men often have advantages compared with women, other protected characteristics also have a significant impact on scientists’ careers. Nature is participating in an effort by a raft of journal publishers to document and reduce bias in scholarly publishing by tracking a range of characteristics. This is a work in progress and sits alongside Springer Nature’s wider commitment to tackling inequity in research publishing.
So what can Nature do to ensure that more women and minority-gender scientists find a home for their research in our pages?
First, we want to encourage a more diverse pool of corresponding authors to submit. The fact that only 17% of submissions come from corresponding authors who identify as women might reflect existing imbalances in science (for example, it roughly tracks with the 18% of professor-level scientists in the European Union who are women, as reported by the European Commission8).
But there remains much scope for improvement. We know that the workplace climate in academia can push women out or see them overlooked for senior positions9. A 2023 study published in eLife found that women tend to be more self-critical of their own work than men are and that they are more frequently advised not to submit to the most prestigious journals10.
Second, just as prestigious universities should not simply lament their low application numbers from under-represented groups, we should not sit back and wait for change to come to us. To this end, our editors will actively seek out authors from these communities when at conferences and on laboratory visits. We will be more proactive in reaching out to women and early-career researchers to make sure they know that Nature wants to publish their research. We encourage authors with excellent research, at any level of seniority and at any institution, to submit their manuscripts.
Third, in an effort to make peer review fairer, Nature’s editors have been actively working to recruit a more diverse group of referees; 2017 data found that women made up just 16% of our reviewers. We need to double down on our efforts to improve this situation and update readers on our progress. In the future, we also plan to analyse whether corresponding authors’ gender affects the number of review cycles they face, and whether there are differences in relation to gender according to discipline and prestige of their affiliated institution. We need to improve our understanding of the sources of inequity before we can work on ways to address them. Nature’s editors will also strive to minimize our own biases through ongoing unconscious-bias training.
Last but not least, we will keep publishing our data on authorship and peer review, alongside complementary statistics on the gender of contributors to articles outside original research. Although today’s data present just a snapshot, Nature remains committed to tracking the gender of authors, to regularly updating the community on our efforts, and to exploring ways to make the publication process more equitable.
Researchers propose that governments apply a new method for calculating the benefits that arise from conserving biodiversity and nature for future generations.
The method can be used by governments in cost-benefit analyses for public infrastructure projects, in which the loss of animal and plant species and ‘ecosystem services’ — such as filtering air or water, pollinating crops or the recreational value of a space — are converted into a current monetary value.
This process is designed to make biodiversity loss and the benefits of nature conservation more visible in political decision-making.
However, the international research team says current methods for calculating the values of ecosystem services “fall short” and have devised a new approach, which they believe could easily be deployed in Treasury analysis underpinning future Budget statements.
Their approach, published in the journal Science, takes into consideration the increase in monetary value of nature over time as human income increases, as well as the likely deterioration in biodiversity, making it more of a scarce resource.
This contrasts with current methods, which do not consider how the value of ecosystem services changes over time.
“Our study provides governments with a formula to estimate the future values of scarce ecosystem services that can be used in decision-making processes,” said Moritz Drupp, Professor of Sustainability Economics at the University of Hamburg and lead author on this study.
Two factors play a key role in this value adjustment: on the one hand, income will rise and with it the prosperity of the world’s population — by an estimated two percent per year after adjusting for inflation.
As incomes go up, people are willing to pay more to conserve nature.
“On the other hand, the services provided by ecosystems will become more valuable the scarcer they become,” said Professor Drupp. “The fact that scarce goods become more expensive is a fundamental principle in economics, and it also applies here. And in view of current developments, unfortunately, we must expect the loss of biodiversity to continue.”
According to the researchers, the present value of ecosystem services must therefore be set much higher in today’s cost-benefit analyses, to more than 130 percent if just including the rise of income.
If also taking into account the impact on Red List Index endangered species, the value adjustment would amount to more than 180 percent.
Accounting for these effects will increase the likelihood of projects that conserve ecosystem services passing a cost-benefit test.
The research team includes three UK-based authors: Professor Mark Freeman (University of York), Dr. Frank Venmans (LSE), and Professor Ben Groom (University of Exeter).
“The monetary values for the environment that are currently used by policy makers in the appraisal of public investments and regulatory change mean that nature becomes relatively less valuable over time compared to other goods and services,” said Professor Groom.
“Our work shows this is wrong. We propose an uplift in the values of ecosystems over time. This proposal could easily be deployed in the Treasury’s analysis that will underpin future Budget statements.”
Dr Venmans added: “Take coral reefs as a specific example. These are expected to decline in area and biodiversity as the climate changes, meaning that the remaining reefs will be much more valuable than today, and even more so as household incomes rise. This matters when we assess coral reef preservation with long-lasting effects.”
Professor Freeman said: “The government is under considerable pressure from many sides for additional public investment. Ensuring that the protection of ecosystems is appraised in a way that is consistent with other public projects, including HS2 and other infrastructure spending, is critical. This is what our work aims to achieve.”
The researchers say that as political decisions can alleviate the loss of biodiversity, it is important that governments are able to adequately assess the consequences of their decisions today and in the future.
Economist Professor Moritz Drupp has developed this research in collaboration with a team of international researchers from Germany, the UK, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United States.
The team advises, among others, HM Treasury, the US White House, and the German Federal Environment Agency.
