Credit: Getty/Andriy Onufriyenko
This year’s release of the latest Nature Index ‘Research Leaders’ rankings brings major changes in its scope and methodology, and is a milestone in the evolution of the database.
There are two key developments: the addition of journals in the applied and social sciences, and an overhaul of how subjects are assigned to research articles.
The additional journals (and a conference) were chosen following a survey of more than 4,000 researchers, from a range of disciplines and fields, on the publication venues where they would want to publish their most significant research.
An initial ranking based on the applied-sciences venues proposed for inclusion following this survey was shared in December, and articles from a finalized list of 17 new journals and one conference have now been fully integrated into the database. In addition, research articles from 15 social-science journals identified through the same survey process have also now been added to broaden disciplinary coverage even further.
The full list of publication venues now in Nature Index, including those from the new subject areas, can be viewed here. The additional journals and conference are also listed at the end of this article.
Although the number of titles added to the database are similar in each subject area, the applied-sciences journals contain far more articles, around 20,200 in 2025, compared with the social-sciences journals, which have added about 2,000 articles to the database.
The second significant change to the database relates to subject classification.
Until now, most articles in the database have been assigned to a subject area according to the main discipline of its journal. For example, all articles in The Lancet were classified as health-sciences articles, all articles in Advanced Functional Materials were assigned to physical sciences and so on. The only exceptions were five journals that were classified as multidisciplinary (including Nature and Science).
From the release of these rankings onwards, all publication venues in the database will, in effect, be treated as multidisciplinary with each individual article being assigned to a subject area.
How do these changes affect comparison with rankings in previous years?
Articles from the new journals have been added for 2024 and 2025, to aid comparison, and the new subject methodology has been calculated for all rankings going back to 2015.
This means that we can continue to look at long-term trends in subjects that have been covered extensively by the database since that year — in other words, the four natural-science areas of physical sciences, chemistry, Earth & environmental sciences and biological sciences. For the subjects where key journals were introduced later — health sciences in 2022 and now applied and social sciences in 2024 — a comparison between years should consider when titles were added, but there will be some ‘like-for-like’ analysis that is possible.
To get an idea of how the changes to subject assignment alter the make-up of the database, we’ve created a chart to show a ‘before and after’ view of how the proportion of each subject changes according to whether disciplines were determined by journal or article.
Why are we making these changes?
Put simply, these changes are designed to broaden the disciplinary scope of the Nature Index database. Both changes mean that we are tracking more articles in subjects that were previously only slightly recognized in the index, mainly through a small number of journals that were deemed ‘multidisciplinary’.
With the addition of journals that concentrate on the applied and social sciences, and a recalibration of subject assignment across the board, the database should now better reflect high-quality research in all disciplines where the primary mode of sharing knowledge is through peer-reviewed papers.
Additional journals and conference added to Nature Index
Applied sciences
Acta Biomaterialia
Annals of Mathematics
Applied Energy
Cities
Computers & Education
Computers in Human Behavior
Energy
Energy & Environmental Science
Environmental Pollution
Environmental Research
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Inventiones mathematicae
Journal of Cleaner Production
Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B: Statistical Methodology
Nature Energy
Nature Sustainability
Plant Biotechnology Journal
Sustainable Cities and Society
Social sciences
American Economic Review
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Management Science
Nature Human Behaviour
Higher Education
Academy of Management Journal
Journal of Political Economy
American Political Science Review
Econometrica
American Sociological Review
The Review of Economic Studies
World Development
Journal of Financial Economics
American Journal of Sociology
American Journal of Political Science
