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Harvard University has lost its place as the top-ranked academic institution in the Nature Index, having been replaced by Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China. The Boston, Massachusetts-based institution has been the top-ranked university since 2015 — the earliest year for which the index has comparable data.
In the overall Nature Index 2026 Research Leaders rankings — which also include government and healthcare institutions — Harvard has fallen to third place. It is now ranked below the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing — the world's largest scientific organization and the leading institution in the Nature Index — and Zhejiang University.
The rankings, which are based on institutions' 2025 contributions to journals tracked by the Nature Index database, underscore China’s growing dominance in high-quality research output. Chinese institutions have taken nine of the top 10 spots overall, up from eight in last year’s tables.
When comparing output, CAS’s Share of 3,655.1 in 2025 is almost three times that of Zhejiang University (Share 1,276.9) — a gap that has widened from the previous year, when CAS’s Share was 2.5 times that of Harvard. (Share measures the contribution of countries, territories and institutions to papers in the Nature Index database.)
The tables this year reflect two major changes to the Nature Index. In addition to natural-science journals (which the index has been tracking since 2015) and health-science journals (which were added to the database in 2022), the Research Leaders 2026 release includes new sets of journals in the applied sciences and social sciences. Two years of publication data from these journals (2024 and 2025) has been added to the index to enable a fair year-on-year comparison. The additional applied-science journals represented roughly 20,200 extra articles in the database in 2025, and the social-science journals added around 2,000.
The second change is that the index now categorizes research disciplines at the article level, rather than the journal level, to better reflect the range of subjects covered within journals.
Making moves
Alongside Zhejiang, other Chinese universities that made big moves in 2025 include Sichuan University in Chengdu, which entered the top 10 in tenth place with a Share of 880.9, up from 16th in last year’s tables. Fudan University in Shanghai is hot on its heels, in 11th place with a Share of 872.5, up from 12th.
Among the fastest rising academic institutions, Shanghai Jiao Tong University had the largest increase in Share between 2024 and 2025, at 243.2, followed by Zhejiang University and Sichuan University.
Notable falls in the ranks include Germany's Max Planck Society, which has dropped out of the top 10 for the first time. One of the largest scientific networks in Europe, Max Planck sunk from 10th in 2024 to 13th in 2025. The French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), another of Europe’s largest research institutes, dropped out of the top 10 in last year’s Research Leaders and is now in 16th place.
Stanford University in California and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the United States’ second and third-ranked institutions, tumbled further in 2025. Stanford dropped one place to 14th and MIT fell three places to 21st.
Leading US and European institutions aren’t the only ones to have slipped down the ranks. The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) in Beijing, dropped from seventh in 2024 to eighth in 2025. Peking University, also in Beijing, took seventh place in 2025.
A loss of position doesn’t necessarily mean an institution is producing less research in Nature Index journals; UCAS, for example, increased its Share by 14.8% between 2024 and 2025, but Peking increased its Share by 16.8%.
Changes in Share should also be assessed against the growth of the database itself. From 2024 to 2025, the Nature Index recorded a year-on-year growth in articles of 10.8%. As a result, any institutions with an increase in Share less than 10.8% might have increased their output for the period, but still lost ground. Harvard, for example, increased its output by 0.6%, which is way below the overall growth of the index.
A closer look
Looking beyond the top 10, Chinese institutions have claimed more top-100 positions in 2025. In 2024, China had 47 institutions in the top 100, and in 2025, it had 51.
Japan has the highest ranked institution outside China, Europe and the United States — the University of Tokyo, in 27th place — followed by Canada, with the University of Toronto in 48th place.
Subject area rankings give a more nuanced view of country and institution strengths. Chinese institutions make up all top-10 places in applied sciences and chemistry, for example. They also make up 9 of the top 10 spots in Earth and environmental sciences, with Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres — the largest scientific organization in Germany — taking the fourth spot. The China Meteorological Administration, the country’s national weather service, took second place in Earth and environmental sciences, up from sixth in 2024.
In biological sciences in 2025, Chinese institutions took five of the top 10 places and US institutions took three. Max Planck and CNRS are in third and tenth place, respectively.
In the health sciences, historically an area of strength for the United States, there were just three US institutions in the top ten in 2025: Harvard University (first place), National Institutes of Health (fourth place) and Stanford University (ninth). Chinese institutions, led by CAS, make up the other top-10 places.
US institutions dominate the social-sciences ranks, in nine of the top 10 places, with China’s Tsinghua University in fifth.
Chinese institutions make up five of the top 10 physical sciences places; European institutions and the University of Tokyo (the institution’s only top-10 spot in 2025) round out the others.
Trends in the Nature Index Research Leaders should not be used in isolation to infer changes in funding or science policies, but they do provide a good window into how the balance of global research power is evolving. China’s sustained gains at the top are increasingly reshaping the institutional landscape, as Western institutions compete for a shrinking share of top-tier positions.
