While academic institutions are not solely pressing for publication of research in top ranking journals such as Nature, it certainly goes someway towards fulfilling their various mission statemetnts. This bit of data analysis looks at whether institutions’ world rankings, based on the Times Higher Education World Universities rankings of 2005 and 2010, changed the apparent quality of the Universities whose research made it to press.
As Louise pointed out, in our papers there was a large proportion of USA-based institutions that published research in Nature in our 2005 selection.
Although there are many factors at work that determine the quality of an institution according to its world ranking, I thought it’d be interesting to see, where possible, whether publishing research had a correlation with improving the prestige of a University.
Science Media Watch 