Five institutions from Asia - four from Japan and one from China - feature in a new ranking of the world's top 50 institutions. The Nature Publishing Index Global Top 50 published today ranks the top 50 institutions in the world, according to their output of primary research articles in Nature research journals in 2010.

The University of Tokyo, number one in the Asia-Pacific, is number six in the global rankings, followed by RIKEN at 23, Kyoto University at 25, the Chinese Academy of Sciences at 32 and Osaka University at 33. The Global Top 50 launches today as a beta website at www.natureasia.com/publishing-index/global/. The Nature Publishing Index Global Top 50 is a collaboration with Digital Science, a sister division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

The launch of the beta site for the Nature Publishing Index Global Top 50 coincides with the publication today of the Nature Publishing Index 2010 Asia Pacific. The Asia Pacific supplement provides a snapshot of 2010 rankings of research institutions and countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Now in its second year of publication, the Nature Publishing Index 2010 Asia Pacific finds some interesting year-on-year trends. The order of the top five countries in the Asia-Pacific region remains unchanged from 2009 – Japan, China, Australia, Korea, Singapore. But China and Singapore demonstrate rapid growth in the number of primary research articles published in Nature journals from 2009 to 2010.

The Nature Publishing Index puts the Asia-Pacific rankings in a global context. The Asia-Pacific rankings are available at www.natureasia.com/publishing-index and feature a 12-month rolling window of data, updated weekly. The supplement published today provides in-depth analysis of the 2010 results by country and provides a list of the top 200 institutions in the region.

"This is just the starting point of many different ways to interpret and mine the data in the index," said David Swinbanks, Managing Director Asia and Australasia, Nature Publishing Group (NPG). "We warmly welcome feedback and hope that it will become a dynamic entity that responds to feedback from its users."

The Index results should be used with some caveats. The Index only covers Nature and the 16 Nature research journals, so while it offers broad coverage of basic research in the life sciences, physical and chemical sciences, coverage of applied sciences, engineering and clinical medicine is relatively limited, and so the index should be used primarily as an indicator of strength in high quality basic research. It does not incorporate publication in other high quality journals. The Index also only considers one factor- publication output in one family of journals. It does not weight multiple factors in the way that other rankings do, such as the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities or the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.

The output of an institution or country obviously depends on its size. Finally, some institutions have very large numbers of researchers that help drive up their rankings. So it is important to take into account the numbers of researchers in an institution or country when interpreting the results.

"Because the modern scientific research organization may include traditional divisions as well as specialized institutes, collaborations, affiliates and other types of structures, defining the boundary of organization can be challenging," says Caitlin Trasande, Head of Science Metrics at Digital Science. "However, we view organizational complexity as positive sign that research organizations think flexibly about how researchers in different scientific domains and organizational cultures work best." Feedback on how institutes are defined and measured can be sent to institutes@digital-science.com.