• In the recently-released Nature Index table 2020, India is placed twelfth globally in science research output. The top five positions have gone to the United States of America, China, Germany, United Kingdom and Japan.           

What is the Nature Index?

• The Nature Index is a database of author affiliation information collated from research articles published in an independently selected group of 82 high-quality science journals.

• The database is compiled by Nature Research, a division of the international scientific publishing company Springer Nature that publishes academic journals. Nature Research’s flagship publication is Nature, a weekly multidisciplinary journal first published in 1869.

• The Nature Index provides a close to real-time proxy of high-quality research output and collaboration at the institutional, national and regional level.

• The Nature Index is updated monthly and also releases annual tables of country.

Key findings of Nature Index, 2020 on India:

• Globally the top-rated Indian institutions in this list are Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), a group of 39 institutions at the 160th position and Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore at the 184th position.

• Three of the autonomous institutions of the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India have found their place among top 30 Indian Institutions as per Nature Index 2020 ratings. These are

• the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), Kolkata at 7th position,
• Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore at 14th position
• N. Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata at 30th position.