“The Nature Index 2015” for the Asia-Pacific region was released in March. The Index tracks articles published in selected science journals chosen by a group of independent researchers, and is used to assess the impact and productivity of countries. A country’s weighted fractional count (WFC) is a measure of articles with authors from a country, accounting both for the number of authors of each paper and the disproportionate number of astronomy and astrophysics papers. By WFC, scientists in the Asia-Pacific region produced around 25% of the papers in the Index. In 2014, China had the second-highest WFC worldwide, after the US. Japan, South Korea, Australia and India filled the remaining positions of the top five for the region. Compared with global output, publications from Asia-Pacific scientists focused more on chemistry—representing 20% of chemistry articles in the Index—and less on life sciences. In the region, China had the highest WFC in chemistry, physical sciences, and earth and environmental sciences, while Japan had the highest WFC in life sciences. The Index also found that Asia-Pacific countries with higher gross domestic expenditures on R&D published more articles.

Source: Nature Index