Are China’s universities really the best in the world?

Jun 18th 2025|3 min read

A decade ago Nature, a scientific publisher, began tallying the contributions made by researchers at different institutions to papers published across a set of 145 respected journals. When the first such Nature Index was published in 2016, the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) ranked first, but American and European institutions dominated the top ten. Harvard placed second, with Stanford and MIT fifth and sixth; the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the German Max Planck Society were third and fourth; Oxford and Cambridge took ninth and tenth (seventh and eighth place went, respectively, to the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres and the University of Tokyo).