The Nature Index: a toolbox for research output and collaboration in international biomedical research, with an application to Russia, India, and other countries
A description of the terminology and methodology used in this supplement, and a guide to the functionality that is available free online at natureindex.com.
The Nature Index provides absolute and fractional counts of article publication at the institutional and national level, and it’s an indicator of global high-quality research output and collaboration. The most recent 12 months are available at natureindex.com under a Creative Commons licence. The database is compiled by Nature Portfolio.
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. The Nature Index shows that at least one article from a bilateral collaboration between any two institutions can be tracked.
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 give information on the country’s/territory’s top collaborators and their relationship with other organizations. Users can track an institution’s performance over time, create their own indexes and export table 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. A data table lists all the measures, scholarly works, citing patents, works cited by patents and patent citations for each institution.
It is noted that we have defined biomedical sciences in the widest possible sense to encompass basic research relevant to the biomedical domain. Although every effort has been made to remove anomalies, some counts may be higher because the fields of research used to search Dimensions might pick up articles not related to biomedical research.
Almost 25% of Russia’s papers and review articles, as recorded in Scopus, were internationally co-authored last year, the same as the year before. China is close to becoming the top research partner of Russia, and India is up to seventh place. 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.
Tensions between China and the US have not had a noticeable effect on researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change or the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Countries are working to stop these tensions interfering with ongoing talks to agree new treaties on preventing pandemics and ending plastics pollution.
Overall, the past year has been a mixed bag for cooperation towards common global goals. The deal reached at COP15 was a high point, although the devil there will be in both the detail and the implementation. The COP27 climate summit held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, in November brought some movement on the crucial sticking point of ‘loss and damage’ finance transfers from higher- to lower-income countries, although little further progress on decarbonization.
The textbook examples of nations working in their own interests that came from the COVID-19 Pandemic continued. The governments of a relatively small number of wealthy countries had already bought and hoarded vaccines from pharmaceutical companies in Europe and the United States (Nature 607, 211–212; 2022). Together, these countries opposed an international campaign (in which Nature was proud to play a small part) urging the sharing of vaccines, therapies and intellectual property. The World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghaliyesus repeatedly emphasized that no one is safeuntil everyone is safe, so they could have done more to get people in low and lower-middle-income countries vaccinations quicker.
But a more coordinated approach is needed, and one that supports not only the activity of science but also its organization and management. The representatives of the international group of science academies, including ones in Europe and the US, gathered in Warsaw, Poland to put together what they call action steps for rebuilding Ukraine’s science, research and innovation. They said that planning for a post-war science recovery should begin now. The group has created a forum, which it is calling the Ukrainian Science, Innovation, and Research Coordinating Group, to share knowledge of its support for Ukraine’s research system.
China stopped offering incentives for researchers to publish in international journals two years ago. It’s in no one’s interests if China’s researchers become more isolated from their international counterparts (Nature 579, 8; 2020). This is starting to happen. In the last 20 years, the number of co-authored papers between researchers in the United States and China has fallen. There has been a drop in the number of authors reporting dual US and China affiliations on their research papers, too.
Rivalry between the two countries is also being played out in trade and technology, with the era in which powerful countries encouraged open markets looking to be at a turning point. The United States is limiting the sale of US technology to China, due to its high consumption of artificial intelligence and supercomputing. It has made it illegal for US citizens to work for Chinese technology companies. It encourages African country to become an alternative base for technology cooperation, partly due to its desire to partner with itself instead of China. China retaliated against the US move by lodging a dispute at the World Trade Organization, arguing that it was a violation of their free-trade agreements.
An economist by the name of Pedro Conceio says that the world is in a new uncertainty complex with an ongoing pandemic, war, climate risks and associated economic shocks. More instances of countries raising trade barriers are likely, and more instances of nations using science and technology towards foreign policy objectives.
That said, governments must accept that they have responsibilities to ensure the integrity of international cooperation in science-based policymaking. In the case of climate change, that responsibility now falls to the United Arab Emirates, which will take over the presidency of the next climate summit, COP28.
Comment on the dispute between authors of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider and Russian and Belarussian scientists after the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022
Physicists who work on experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) say they have settled a dispute over how to acknowledge authorships of Russian and Belarussian scientists on their research papers — one of the tensions that has affected global physics collaborations since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
There have been hundreds of manuscripts reporting the results of the LHC that appeared on the preprints server without the author names, affiliations, or funder details. But their progress to peer-reviewed publication had been frozen while scientists argued about how to list authors. There was an author list for more than 100 of the papers that had been accepted by journals but were not accessible on their websites. The agreements, quietly reached in early February, should mean that journals can now proceed to formal publication.
The solution differs from the compromise that was reached by the researchers at Japan’s high energy collider research organization.
In June 2022, they declared that papers would list the names of authors only. In October, the collaboration revised their position again and added that funders would be listed with their ORCID but not their affiliation, as well as stating that the acknowledgments are not to be construed as endorsements of any statement made.
The beginnings of war: the Eastern-Ukrainian Centre for Medical Genetics and Prenatal Diagnosis (ETHICS) in Kyiv
The war in Ukraine did not start until February of 2022, for my colleagues and me. It started in 2014, when Russia installed a puppet government in the Donbas in the east of my country. The Eastern-Ukrainian Center for Medical Genetics and Prenatal Diagnosis, a state-of-the-art facility which I founded and have headed for many years, was originally located in Donetsk, the capital of the Donbas.
A survey found that a lot of people were continuing their work inUkraine over the internet. Some home institutions have tensions with absent teaching staff because they were told 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 full Russian invasion, our new home was destroyed as was the building in which my colleagues and I used to rent apartments. Some of us escaped the city within a few days. Others, in particular those unable to leave elderly parents who had moved with them, stayed back in their basements waiting for help. We had weeks of uncertainty as to their fate.
We were able to survive all the difficulties. Our knowledge wasn’t captured when our centre was gone. Some colleagues with children moved abroad and others settled in western Ukraine and continued to collaborate remotely. Our centre now operates in Kyiv, conducting prenatal screening and other types of genetic testing.
Prysiazhna has now found a part-time job at Sojo University, in Japan, in a different field than what she was previously working in. “It’s hard to be alone,” she says, saying that she checks Facebook every morning to make sure her old friends and colleagues in Ukraine are still alive. “But war has changed me. She says you become more brave and resilient. If someone had told me a year ago that I’d go alone, I would not have believed them. But I had no fear.”
I was relieved when I read of the people who he could rescue from the site of a notorious massacre in the early stages of the war. After a long time, it was confirmed that Bizhan Sharopov, who had been missing in action since April, had been killed.
The courage that Ukrainian people are demonstrating is beyond words, and not only those on the battlefields. With the loss of loved ones, the Ukrainian people are struggling to survive, living in cellars without water and food and sometimes without light or heat.
Ukrainian scientists continue their research and are integrated into the global scientific community. Some of us have received foreign research grants. I was lucky to obtain the Researchers at Risk Fellowship established by the British Academy and the Royal Society with the Council for At-Risk Academics, allowing me to persevere in my work researching the causes of pre-eclampsia. I hope that the results will help my country.
The war’s consequences are not limited to the problems prior to it. The quality and integrity of Ukrainian scientific research can’t be assessed by the Ministry of Education and Science. The Ukrainian National Agency for Quality Assurance of Higher Education upheld an allegation that the minister had plagiarized in his earlier work, but the matter wascontested 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 research community can make rapid gains once the war ends because of the strong Ukrainian science. Minakova believes that her research is crucial to this effort. Her team and Bondar’s have just won a grant from the US Embassy in Kyiv to fund the education of master’s students in the science, technology, policy and business of solar power.
Despite frequent power failures and air raid alarms, Minakova is still researching high-efficiency solar cells and hopes to visit New Orleans for training later this year. She delivers lectures and lab-demonstration classes online to her undergraduate students, who aren’t allowed on Kharkiv’s campus for safety reasons. She helps older residents find water and medicine in her spare time and also helps kids with goodwill token for soldiers. “The best idea for living is to have no free time,” she says.
The science ministry says that 93 research and higher education centers have been damaged or destroyed. Some 228 remain unharmed. The Institute of Radio Astronomy in Kharkiv had the world’s largest decametre- wavelength radio telescope 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. There are disruption to water supply and heating. Generators and fuel are hard to come by. As a result, universities and research institutes have to plan elaborate schedules for experiments and online teaching, because students in different places don’t always have electricity at the same time.
As Russia continues to bomb the country, the other regular, but less predictable, interruptions are air-raid sirens, which typically give a 30–60 minute warning to move to safety, says Komarov. “Each man and woman has found a way to cope,” he says. “I just keep working, working and working even if things go wrong.”
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. Russia bombed his university on New Year’s Eve, shattering over a thousand windows and making it impossible to board up before winter hit.
“Most of my time and that of my colleagues — the deans and directors — is spent on adjusting the working schedule to the power cut-offs and alarms, and organizing logistics, especially for reagents coming from abroad,” he says. In his spare time, Komarov raises funds for the war effort and works on proposals for the construction of a new biomedical science hub when the war is over.
“I make a major effort to continue doing science. It’s difficult not only physically but also because of this psychological pressure. To do something creative you need a peaceful time. Even writing papers became quite a challenge.”
Research support in Ukraine since the invasion: how Ivan Brusak used to work with the Simons Foundation, and how he later left his country
Thousands of scientists living inUkraine have left due to a lack of spare office space, and numerous universities and international collaborations have offered a range of support. 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 EU’s largest support schemes was the MSCA4Ukraine which offered placements to PhD and post graduate students.
In January, the Simons Foundation in New York City, which supports research in mathematics and basic science, announced more than $1.2 million of funding for 405 scientists in Ukraine, including doctoral candidates. Each will receive a $100 or $200 monthly stipend with some leaders of research teams receiving larger, lump sums.
SfU is also experimenting with a website on which more than 80 Ukrainian research institutes have posted 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 doesn’t have to be financial. There are many workshops on grant management and bottom up initiatives. Lack of communication and access to the international community is a key psychological challenge that people are experiencing.
Young academics, such as Ivan Brusak, a 28-year-old specialist in geodesy at Lviv Polytechnic National University in Ukraine, say they need equipment and remote international collaborations.
When the war began, Brusak took months off work to help organize student support. His team coordinated a giant weaving operation conducted at more than 100 venues around Lviv, turning tonnes of fabrics and threads into camouflage nets. It also procured and delivered kit such as binoculars and thermal imaging cameras to the military.
Brusak would volunteer from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., writing scientific papers in the evenings. He doesn’t know how he managed it. After the summer, his volunteering time had stopped and he had defended his thesis.
He likes the collaboration he has with Polish scientists. “The understanding that despite the war we continue to cooperate gives motivation.”
Last December, Polish and Ukrainian scientists working with SfU and other institutions released a survey of more than 600 Ukrainian scientists who left their country after the invasion (see go.nature.com/3k3zdpy). The organizers reached as many respondents as they could with the help of networks such as SfU, but say that they probably missed scientists who are not linked to these groups. The results show that most people outside of Ukrainian are females, especially since men are not supposed to leave before the age of 60. Many have children with the senior researchers.
Some ties have loosened. Olena Prysiazhna left Ukrainian science, at least for now, after her contract at the National University of Kyiv expired when she couldn’t get it to renewal in time. She had fled with her mother, younger sister (a physics postgraduate student) and their dog, after a missile landed in their neighbour’s back garden. When Nature spoke to Prysiazhna last April (see Nature 605, 414–416; 2022), the family was in the Netherlands recovering from the ordeal, and both sisters were looking for scientific work.
Prysiazhna thinks she will return to Ukraine one day, although her family’s home is damaged. The mother and sister of Prysiazhna are in a converted holiday camp in the Netherlands. The sister is working for a logistical company and is trying to find a way to defend her thesis, after almost finishing her PhD.
The scientists in Prysiazhna’s position might never come back if Komarov is to be believed. But Rose, who studies phenomena such as brain drain, disagrees.
Regardless of whether people are refugees or not, there is no need for brain drain fears to be substantiated. Most people return and then they bring new ideas back. They still give knowledge to people who are there even when they are not coming back. Even this way there is knowledge sharing.”
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00508-0
The role of the National Research Foundation in the reconstruction of Ukraine during the second world war. The impact of the new data on research collaboration between Poland and Nigeria
“The war will stop and then we will need to be good specialists in alternative energy,” she says. I hope the world can help us rebuild our country.
The academy is responsible for funding the majority of research institutes because they were not universities before Ukrainian independence in 1991. Research institutions didn’t have the power to make their own decisions because they were part of the state. The National Research Foundation of Ukraine was created in the years before the war to act as an independent grant-giving body. The organizations struggle to fulfill their roles.
Last November, the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine published a draft recovery plan for education and science. The plan includes a proposal to create a high-risk, high-reward funding agency along the lines of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). It also calls for greater integration with the European community and global research communities to aid in the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War.
The pattern in nature’s analysis of scientific papers in the other database, called Dimensions, is similar to that in the Scopus database. The data shows that the relationship between Poland and Nigeria has not changed in the last four years.
According to Michael Rose, who studies the economics of science and innovation at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Germany, the Ukrainian government discouraged collaboration with Russian researchers.
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.