There is a guide to the nature index
The Nature Index: a free online tool for the analysis of international and country-level research outputs and collaborations in the biomedical sector
A guide to the free online functionality of this supplement is included in the description of the terminology and methodology used.
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.
The small variation in the total number of articles in the Nature Index journals can be accounted for by adjusted share. It is calculated using the total number of articles in the index in a given year against the number of articles in a base year and adjusted to the base year levels.
The amount of the shares on the papers to which both institutions have contributed is the sum of the bilateral collaboration score between the two institutions. 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.
Each query will return a profile page that shows the country’s recent output, which can be searched for more information. The articles can be displayed by journal and article. The 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 see how their institution is performing over time, create their own indexes and export data.
The tables show the overall institution ranking by patent influence metric as well as the leading institutions in academic, government and NPO/NGO sectors. The data table shows the works cited by patents and the works listed in the Lens measures.
Basic research related to the biomedical domain has been defined in the broadest possible sense. Although every effort has been made to eliminate anomalies, some counts might be slightly high because the fields of research descriptors used to search Dimensions might pick up articles not directly related to biomedical research, for example, related to some aspects of microbiology and cell biology.
In comparison to the prior year, only a small proportion of Russia’s papers and review articles were internationally co-authored last year. China and India are on the verge of becoming Russia’s top research partners, compared to the United States and Germany. Among Russia’s top 25 collaborators, the only other countries that have increased their share of its international co-authorships in 2022 are Kazakhstan and Iran.
International cooperation in science tends to take the form of projects and programmes initiated and led by researchers at universities or scientific academies, or those working in industry or at autonomous science-funding agencies. Projects such as CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, and the James Webb Space Telescope are exemplars. Most of the new announcements are part of a different trend in which individual nations and regions are collaborating to further their own objectives, and that seems likely to continue for the foreseeable future. This is not out of the ordinary.
Cooperation on space, nuclear energy and meteorology was also on the agenda during the landmark visit by China’s president, Xi Jinping, to Saudi Arabia in early December. The Fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity (COP15) concluded in Montreal, Canada, this week with an agreement to halt and eventually reverse the decline of species.
But the COVID-19 pandemic continued to provide textbook examples of nations working in their own interests. Many wealthy countries have already bought vaccines from the pharmaceutical companies in Europe and the United States. Nature played a small part in the fight against the international campaign to share vaccines, therapies and intellectual property. More people in low- and middle-income countries could have been immunized faster if they had listened to the warnings of the World Health Organization chief.
If Ukraine wins the war, Rose, Bondar, and others believe there could be a web of connections between western science and the country that will help it rebuild and reform its science in the aftermath of the Russian invasion.
The China Initiative: Defending Chinese Science in the Age of Warfare, and the Role of Technology in the U.S. Climate Summit
One year after the end of the controversial China Initiative, scientists of Chinese descent say that they are still being unfairly targeted. More than 150 people have been charged with doing things such as failing to disclose funding or partnerships with institutions in China, most of them Chinese. Few of the arrests led to convictions, and the programme was shut down under accusations of racial bias. “I am afraid of doing any research,” says physicist Xiaoxing Xi, who was arrested at gunpoint in front of his family over charges that were later dropped. We live in fear.
The era in which powerful countries encouraged open markets looking to a turning point is also being played out in technology, with the two countries competing in trade and technology. The United States is restricting sales by US companies (and non-US companies that use US technology) to China of the types of microchip that are used in artificial intelligence and supercomputing. US citizens are not allowed to work for Chinese technology companies. It also wants countries to partner with itself instead of China, which partly explains its interest in encouraging African countries to become an alternative base for technology cooperation. Last week, China retaliated by lodging a dispute with the World Trade Organization, the body that sets rules for international trade, arguing that the US move is a violation of free-trade rules that both countries have signed up to.
The world is clearly in what economist Pedro Conceição calls “a new uncertainty complex”, with an ongoing pandemic, war, climate risks and associated economic shocks. We are likely to see more instances of countries raising trade barriers and protecting their economies, as well as nations using science and technology to help their foreign-policy objectives.
Governments must accept the fact that they have responsibilities to ensure the integrity of international cooperation. The presidency of the next Climate Summit will go to the United Arab Emirates, due to be held in Paris, France.
The colloquium of Polish scientists and international physics experiment Belle II: How to publish their papers without a Russian author list, but not their affiliations
Some researchers on the LHC experiments said if Russian institutions were not mentioned, they could not co-authored with Russians as long as they shared authorship. Some government science funders, including in Poland and Ukraine, supported this stance. The Poland’s science ministry said the country’s institutions had to annually list all of their publications with proof of the ministry’s funding support.
More than 250 manuscripts have appeared on the preprintserver without any names, affiliations, or funder details. Their progress to peer-reviewed publication was stopped because scientists argued about how to list authors. When these papers were formally accepted by journals, they were listed on their websites as ‘in press’, but without an author list. The agreements, quietly reached in early February, should mean that journals can now proceed to formal publication.
The solution differs from a compromise reached by researchers with another international physics experiment, Belle II, at Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba.
In June 2022, they declared that papers would list the names of authors only. The collaboration changed their stance in October and added that funders would be recognized in an acknowledgments list and that authors would be listed with their ORCID, but not their affiliation.
The end of the Russian war and the determination of the fate of women in Ukraine, a case study of a remote genetic testing centre in Kyiv
His work now takes him about three times as long as it usually would, he says. “I feel constant fatigue from the war around me and the deaths of people I know, which diverts the focus from science.” He and his colleagues from Ukraine will not give up. We are waiting for the war to come to an end.
One-third of the people in the survey were continuing their work in Ukraine remotely. But 30% reported that there were tensions with some home institutions, for example because the institution had told absent teaching staff to return or lose their jobs. And although 42% said they would return to Ukraine if the war ended within a few months, equal proportions of the remainder said they would not return or didn’t know what they would do.
After the Russian invasion of March 22, 2022, the building in which my colleagues and I rented apartments was destroyed. Some of us managed to escape the city within days. Some that were unable to leave the elderly parents who had moved with them went back to their homes waiting for help. We were unsure of their fate for weeks.
All the obstacles were overcome once again. Our experience wasn’t captured even though our centre was gone. Some people with children moved abroad and others had to emigrate to western Ukraine where they still work remotely. Our centre now operates in Kyiv, conducting prenatal screening and other types of genetic testing.
Scientific Research in Ukraine during the Second Year of Rejection by Russia: A Case Study with a Ukrainian Physicist Minakova
When the war started I regretted I was no longer young and that I couldn’t join the army to fight for their freedom and independence, something most readers of this journal take for granted. I donated my car to a group of people, one of which is my friend Senenko, a physicist.
A 58-year-old organic chemist who is the director of the Institute of High Technologies at the Taras Shev Ukrainian National University said that science in the country is bad. Many of the scientists who remain, however, are determined to toil on against the odds. International communities are finding ways to help.
The courage that Ukrainian people are demonstrating is beyond words, and not only those on the battlefields. Suffering the grief of losing family members, staying in basements without water and food, living now often without light and heat, the whole Ukrainian people is enduring severe deprivation with dignity and unbroken spirit.
Minakova is one of tens of thousands of scientists in Ukraine striving to keep their research going as their country enters a second year of resisting Russia’s aggression.
There are pre-existing problems that are being affected by the war. The Ministry of Education and Science, which is responsible for assessing the quality and integrity of Ukrainian scientific research, is not fit to perform those tasks. The minister of education and science was himself accused of plagiarism in his earlier scientific work, an allegation upheld by the Ukrainian National Agency for Quality Assurance of Higher Education, although the matter has since been contested on a procedural technicality in the courts. There must be zero tolerance of any corruption that could hinder the development of the country, especially against the background of Ukraine’s candidacy for European Union membership.
The Effects of Artificial Intelligence on Mathematicians: An Empirical Study of the Sensitivity of the US to Women and Males
Calculating proof and creating solutions to problems are aided by tools. It is thought that there are tons of clean-burning hydrogen hidden underground, and the idea of towing boats to quench thirsty cities is controversial.
The field of mathematics is changing in ways that go beyond the contributions of mere calculations, thanks to Artificial Intelligence tools. Even the author of the proof was unsure of how complicated it was. Artificial intelligence might one day be able to converse with mathematicians to find solutions to difficult problems. Some researchers worry that once computers can judge what is interesting and worth proving, human mathematicians will become obsolete. Others say that an artificial intelligence system is as smart as we make it.
Women mathematicians, psychology and economics researchers are more than twice as likely to be elected to a US scientific society as their male counterparts. The increase in qualified female candidates doesn’t seem to have caused the boost, but the study didn’t examine accomplishments beyond publications and citations. There is evidence that females are more likely to be accomplished in science than males, so that could be related to survivorship bias.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00522-2
What should we do if we are going to Africa? Investigating the case of an Antarctic iceberg for water harvesting, recycling, and crop irrigation
If a small, 113-million-tonne iceberg were to be towed from Antarctica to Cape Town in South Africa, it could supply 20% of the city’s water needs for a year. It is what it is, what is not to like? Matthew Birkhold wrote about a lot in Chasing Icebergs. Birkhold is engagingly honest about potential pitfalls of transporting water trapped in icebergs to drought-plagued regions, writes reviewer Josie Glausiusz, although he doesn’t delve much into alternatives such as recycling municipal wastewater, tapping brackish water for crop irrigation, or fog harvesting.
Female researchers face a number of challenges when going to India, from local residents refusing to work with women to objections from family members over travel, and a lack of role models. The extent of the effect is hard to calculate, although it is clear that there is a shortage of women in fields such as geology, evolutionary biology and environmental studies. “Changing that image of what a scientist and a field researcher should look like, should be the first step. Let’s start there,” says evolutionary biologist Ashwini Mohan.
There might be a lot of clean-burning hydrogen gas underground. Researchers at the US Geological Survey estimate that there might be enough to meet rising global demand for thousands of years. An added benefit of underground hydrogen is that it’s renewable, being constantly replenished by reactions between water and rock deep below Earth’s surface. Why didn’t anyone spot it before? It’s not found in the same places as oil and gas reservoirs, and no one was looking for it, say proponents.
The First Month of World War II: When the Ruins and Air-Raide Shocks Stole and the Future Comes to an End
The rubble was a good place to store microscopes, welding equipment and computers. Denys Bondar is a Ukrainian-born partner in New Orleans, Louisiana, and he sent a support package including solar cells to Kharkiv. Minakova has a quarter the size of her lost lab space, which she now has thanks to a new collaboration between the two universities.
Despite frequent power failures and even air-raid alarms, Minakova wants to visit the state of New Orleans for training this year and she is researching high-efficiency solar cells. For safety reasons, her undergrad students don’t be allowed on Kharkiv’s campus to take online classes. In her spare time she helps older residents and children find water and medicine. She says the best way to live is to have no free time.
As of January, the science ministry said there had been 93 damage to research and higher education institutions. Some of them remain unharmed. The world’s largest decametre-wavelength radio telescope is located at the Institute of Radio Astronomy in Kharkiv, and was heavily damaged.
Ukraine has dealt with Russia’s unrelenting destruction of energy infrastructure by putting the country on a schedule of rolling blackouts. Frequent disruption of the water supply and heating system are also subject to it. Generators and fuel are hard to come by. The students in different places don’t have electricity at the same time, which means universities and research laboratories have to plan elaborate schedules for online teaching.
Russia’s continued bombing of the country causes air-raid sirens to sound for 30 to 60 minutes, which lets you know to move to safety. Each man and woman has a way to deal with it. If things go wrong, I don’t stop working.
Komarov, who heads a staff of 60 overseeing 500 undergraduates, says the first month of the war was particularly hard, and dominated by struggles to source even basic reagents. A low point was New Year’s Eve, when Russia bombed his university, shattering more than 1,000 windows that needed to be boarded up before temperatures plunged.
He says that the deans and directors spend most of their time on adjusting the work schedule to the power cut offs and alarms, and organizing Logistics for reagents from abroad. Komarov spends his spare time growing funds for the war effort, and working on ideas for a new science hub once the war is over.
In order to continue doing science I make a lot of effort. This psychological pressure is what makes it difficult both physically and emotionally. To do something creative you need a peaceful time. It became quite a challenge to write papers.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00508-0
SfU, a bottom up approach for international scientists left Ukraine after the First World War II: Ivan Brusak, an engineer in geodesy
Many universities and international organizations have offered spare office space, fellowship and jobs to scientists who have left Ukraine. Rose says that Poland and Germany have taken in the largest number of scientists, but there are also many in France, Spain and Italy and smaller numbers in the United Kingdom and the United States. One of the largest support schemes was the European Union’s 25 million MSCA4Ukraine, which offered temporary placements for doctoral and postdoc students under its Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme.
More than $1.2 million in funding was given to scientists in Ukraine by the New York City based Simons Foundation in January. Some leaders of research teams will get larger, lump sums while others will receive a monthly stipend.
SfU is testing a website where more than 80 Ukrainian research institutes post requests to the international community. These range from fire extinguishers to internships, although Rose says responses to the requests have been disappointing so far.
Polotska says support isn’t always financial. workshops on grant management are examples of a number of bottom up initiatives. Lack of communication and lack of access to international communities are two key psychological difficulties faced by people.
Ivan Brusak, a 28-year-old specialist in geodesy, says they need equipment and remote international collaborations.
Brusak took months off work when the war began, helping to organize student support for the war effort. He coordinated a giant weaving operation that turned hundreds of thousands of fabrics and threads into camouflage nets. It procured and delivered equipment to the military.
Brusak would volunteer from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., writing scientific papers in the evenings. He says he doesn’t understand how he managed it. By summer, his time volunteering had dropped and he successfully defended his thesis in December.
He values a collaboration he has with Polish scientists that began last July. “The understanding that despite the war we continue to cooperate gives motivation.”
Over 600 Ukrainian scientists left their country after the invasion when the survey was released by Polish and Ukrainian scientists. They reached as many respondents as they could with help from SfU and other networks, but say they missed some scientists who are linked to other groups. Despite the fact that those older than 60 years old are not allowed to leave the country, the results show that most of those outside Ukraine are women. The majority are senior researchers, and many have children with them.
Ties have loosened for some. Olena Prysiazhna, a 35-year-old specialist in plasma physics who was at the National University of Kyiv, has left Ukrainian science — at least for now — after her Kyiv contract lapsed when she couldn’t get back in time to renew it. She and her mother and sister ran away after a missile landed in their neighbour’s back garden. The family was healing in the Netherlands after the incident, and both sisters were looking for work.
Prysiazhna assumes she will eventually return to Ukraine, although her family’s home is damaged, as her mother found on a brief return visit. Prysiazhna’s mother and sister, and the dog, now share a room in a converted holiday camp in the Netherlands. Her sister, who had almost finished her PhD when she left Ukraine, is trying to find a way to defend her thesis and is working for a logistics company.
Komarov is concerned that scientists who are not well known may never return to Prysiazhna. Rose studies phenomena such as brain drain.
He says, regardless of whether people are refugees or not, fears of brain drain are not substantiated. Most people return and then they bring new ideas back. They continue to pass on their knowledge when they don’t return. Even this way there is knowledge sharing.”
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00508-0
Beyond the Standard Model: The Science of the World After the First World War II: Scientific Collaboration with the Russians after the 24 February 1922 Invasion
She says that we will need to be good specialists in alternative energy after the war is over. I hope that the world will help us rebuild our country and campuses.
The data available so far can only hint at possible changes, which will become more apparent later this year. Many of the papers published in 2022 were submitted to journals well before Western institutions halted scientific partnerships with Russia in response to the full-scale invasion, which began on 24 February. The raw numbers of papers will increase because of the fact that databases of scientific papers will continue to fill up their collections for another month or two. (Relative proportions of co-authorship are unlikely to vary at this stage.)
The Ukrainian government has strongly discouraged collaboration with Russian researchers and publication in Russian journals, says Michael Rose, who studies the economics of science and innovation at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich, Germany.
The war has come in a general period where nations have become more aware of the competitive geopolitical aspects of research collaboration, Flanagan adds, with countries expanding export controls and introducing restrictions on overseas collaboration in certain activities that have been deemed sensitive to national security.
The link between the appetite-suppressing hormone leptin and social behaviour in mice is surprising, according to the northwest Syria quake
The 6 February earthquake killed more than 4,500 people in northwest Syria, and health systems — already weakened by more than a decade of war — are overwhelmed with 8,500 injured people. “We have used the medications and serums that would have lasted us for four to six months in two to three days,” says maternity-hospital director Ikram Haboush. There are just 64 x-ray machines and a single magnetic resonance machine in northwest Syria. Doctors need to have drugs like painkillers and antibiotics to treat a condition called crush syndrome, which can cause organ failure.
A study in mice has revealed a surprising link between the appetite-suppressing hormone leptin and social behaviour. Male rodents suppressed leptin, but still promoted their interactions with female mice. Leptin is normally produced when an animal’s energy needs have been met, so the hormone could tell the brain that it’s time to prioritize other activities — such as sex. The research could hint at why disordered eating in people sometimes goes hand-in-hand with social difficulties.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00605-0
The Case of Priyanga Amarasekare: The UCLA Code of Conduct and its Subsequents, and the Benefits of Hyperauthorship
Documents seen exclusively by Nature have revealed more about the controversial treatment of ecologist Priyanga Amarasekare at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). A committee found that Amarasekare had breached the faculty code of conduct when alleging racial discrimination by colleagues. The committee had recommended harsher penalties but UCLA chancellor Gene Block had harsher ways to punish them. His suspension and restriction of access to her laboratory were the most egregious of the transgressions that normally lead to sanctions. UCLA declined to discuss the documents, saying it is bound by confidentiality rules. The university does not condone retaliation and supports freedom of expression.
Artificial-intelligence systems are trained to spot subtle patterns in data, which humans might miss. Machines are at a loss when it comes to cause and effect, because they don’t know how the world works. The markings on the lung X-rays can be tricky to read and that’s a reason why programs that spot disease in lung X-rays sometimes go astray. Bengio says that the model of the world that we have allows us to make more robust decisions and predictions. Researchers are looking at building causality into computing, a milestone that could bringAI to a whole new level.
Hyperauthorship — producing papers with more than 100 authors — is becoming more common (although maybe not quite on the scale of a record-setting 2021 COVID vaccine study with 15,025 authors). A longer author list can help researchers who have been overlooked in the past and big collaborations can tackle expensive projects. At the same time, hyperauthorship distorts the metrics that evaluate a project’s impact. It requires thinking from both researchers and the people who read science, says Nicholas Coles, a psychologist.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00605-0
Quantum energy teleportation across distances using random fluctuations in the vacuum, and its use in exoplanet experiments with the James Webb Space Telescope
Researchers showed that energy can be pulled out of empty space by using random fluctuations in the quantum fields that fill the vacuum. Physicists exploited quantum entanglement to swap information about the fluctuations that happened in one place. In one experiment, they used radio pulses to link two carbon atoms in a way that effectively teleported energy across microscopic distances for a few milliseconds. A separate experiment tested quantum energy teleportation using several of IBM’s superconducting quantum computers.
Like Johannes Kepler, Batalha’s mother had shown her a comet. Batalha and Natalie are collaborating on exoplanet projects with the James Webb Space Telescope. The Nature is read for 7 minutes.
