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Nature Index 2025 Research Leaders: Western institutions lose long-held top spots
Major drivers of high-quality science, such as Germany’s Max Planck Society and CNRS in France, drop several places as China’s universities rise.
Bec Crew | 11 June 2025
Western research institutions continue to tumble in the annual Nature Index Research Leaders rankings as those based in China soar. Some institutions with notable results include the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), in Hefei, in third place, Zhejiang University, in Hangzhou, which moves from 10th to 4th, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which has entered the top 10.
Notable falls in the rankings — which this year reflect institutions' 2024 contributions to the natural- and health-sciences journals tracked by the Nature Index database — include Germany's Max Planck Society, which has fallen from 4th to 9th. The French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) has dropped out of the top 10 for the first time, to 13th place.
Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, meanwhile, has held on to second place for the nine years that the Nature Index has comparable annual data, and this edition is no different, with the institution recording a Share of 1,155.19 in 2024. (Share measures the contribution of countries, territories and institutions to papers in the Nature Index database.) Harvard recorded a 17.5% decline in adjusted Share in 2024, a metric that aids year-on-year comparison taking takes account of annual fluctuations in the number of Nature Index articles. This is by far the largest decline among this year’s top 40 institutions.
USTC, which had a Share of 850.60 in 2024, is just over 300 Share points shy of Harvard. It has increased its adjusted Share by 12.5%.
In first place is the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) — the world's largest scientific organization, based in Beijing — which recorded a Share of 2,776.90 in 2024. It has extended its lead compared with the previous year; in 2024 CAS was 1,621.71 Share points ahead of Harvard, and in 2023, it was ahead by around 1,050 Share points.
In 2024, only two non-Chinese institutions made it into the top 10, down from three in 2023. In 2015, by comparison, CAS was the only Chinese institution in the top 10.
As the Nature Index covers a limited set of journals, it tends to represent a zero-sum game: if one institution makes rapid gains, others must drop. Provided Chinese institutions continue to expand their authorship of articles tracked by the Index, other institutions might struggle to get a foothold. For 2023 data, China had 37 institutions in the top 100, up from 31 in 2022; in 2024, it had 43.
The decline of the Max Planck Society — Germany’s prestigious network of research institutes — in the rankings is unusually large. Over the past few years, it’s lost significant ground in chemistry-related output in the database. From 2015 to 2021, it consistently placed within the top 5 for the subject, before dropping to 10th place in 2022. It’s now placed 14th in the world for chemistry output.
It’s a similar story with Max Planck’s physical sciences output — the institution placed second in the subject from 2015 to 2022 before dropping to 4th in 2023, a position it retained in 2024. Max Planck and the CNRS are the only non-Chinese institutions in the top 10 for physical sciences in the Nature Index, and they were the only two in the top 10 to record a negative change in adjusted Share.
Max Planck’s ranking in biological sciences, meanwhile, has remained consistently high, being in the top five since 2015. It moved up in 2024, from 4th place in the subject to 3rd, overtaking the US National Institutes of Health (NIH).
US institutions continue to fall elsewhere, too, with Stanford University, in California — which tumbled from 6th place overall in 2022 to 15th place in 2023 — placing at 16th place in 2024. It has overtaken the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, as the United States’s second-strongest institution in the Nature Index, however. MIT placed 17th in 2024, down from 14th in 2023.
The NIH has dropped out of the overall Nature Index top 20 for the first time, down to 24th place in 2024. It has lost 10 places in the Research Leaders ranking since 2022.
One institution that has made a massive leap is Jilin University, in Changchun, China, which moved from 42nd place in 2023 to 19th place in 2024, recording the second-biggest change in adjusted Share (38.3%) among the top 100 institutions. The institution is strong in chemistry, having increased its adjusted Share in the subject by 27.2% and moving from 14th place to 11th. A topic-level analysis shows that macromolecular and materials chemistry is a particularly strong area for Jilin University.
Tongji University, in Shanghai, China, recorded a 44.1% increase in adjusted Share in 2024, helping it rise to 41st place from 65th in a single year. It is also strong in chemistry, having jumped from 91st place in 2023 to 50th place in 2024.
Looking at the subject-level tables gives important insights. In the biological sciences rankings for 2024, Zhejiang University entered the top 10 for the first time to claim 6th place, up from 19th in 2023. It represents only the second Chinese institutions to break into the top 10 of what has been, and remains, a US-dominated area of research in the Nature Index.
In the health sciences, however, China lost one institution from the top 10. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in 10th place in the subject in 2023, dropped to 13th place in 2024. Yale University took 10th spot, up from 16th. The sole Chinese institution in the health sciences top 10 is Sun Yat-sen University, in Guangzhou, in 7th place. The only other non-US institution is the University of Toronto, in 5th.
It is always difficult to link trends in the Research Leaders data to specific factors such as funding or science policies, in part due to the lag in time between the launch of projects and the publication of a paper. However, the data suggest that some institutions’ strength in specific research areas could be driving large leaps or falls in the ranks. Some research topics in physical sciences and chemistry — two areas in which China is particularly strong— have seen big increases in article volume in the Nature Index between 2023 and 2024.
