Physics, life sciences, genetics: three big players and their top partners

Research is a global game, yet even for top collaborators, the closest partners are mainly local.

26 November 2019

Infographic by Alisdair MacDonald

The infographic shows the top 25 research partners of big science leading collaborators in three fields: high-energy physics, life sciences and genomics.

The Nature Index ranks institutions in the big science fields by their fractional counts (FC), referring to the share of their affiliated authors’ contributions, and article counts (AC) in 82 high-quality journals.

The table rankings are for high affiliation articles only, meaning those with authors from ten or more separate principal institutions.

The partner relationships shown are for the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which ranks second among the world’s top institutions for producing big science research articles in the field of oncology and immunology and third in the field of genetics; the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in Switzerland, which is the third biggest contributor to big science articles in physics and astronomy in the Nature Index; and BGI, a genome sequencing company that is China’s biggest contributor to big science in genetics.

This infographic is based on all collaborative articles from the three institutions identified, regardless of the number of affiliations.

The top 25 collaborators of the three central institutions are shown according to their joint collaboration score (CS) with the central institution, derived by summing the FCs from articles with authors from both institutions. CS determines the size of the partner institutions’ bubbles.

The rank from one to 25 of their CS with the central institution is indicated by their line weight.

Data analysis by Bo Wu; infographic by Alisdair MacDonald

This story is part of Nature Index 2019 Collaboration and Big Science supplement. See more stories here.