Nature magazine has released its latest Nature Index of the contributions of various institutions to the world of physics, with Chinese scientific institutions well in the lead, holding eight out of the top ten spots (the Max Planck Society and the French National Center for Scientific Research join them). The highest-ranked U.S. institution is MIT, ranked 13. Harvard and Stanford are ranked 16th and 20th. The figures are based on research output from November 2023 through October 2024.
Chinese researchers are not taking any victory lap over the results, which clearly shows the directionality of the process. “The increasing number of high-quality scientific papers published by Chinese researchers in top journals in recent years reflects to some extent that China’s overall strength in physics research is on the rise,” said Chen Xiaolong, a physicist at the Institute of Physics under Chinese Academy of Sciences. But this metric was not everything, he said. “China still lags behind the United States overall in terms of original and truly groundbreaking research breakthroughs, except for a few branches,” Chen said.
