Multi-views on Nature Index of Chinese academic institutions

The Nature Index (NI) has become a rather powerful tool to identify emerging trends in various research fields. According to the NI 2015 released at the beginning of 2016, China, the world’s second largest producer of research papers, maintains a strong momentum on scientific output. Based on online source metrics such as Mendeley bookmarks, we evaluated multi-viewed impact of the top 50 academic institutions in the NI China. For the selection of multiple metrics, we investigated the presence and coverage of different kinds of online metrics, with a particular focus on their correlations with traditional citation-based metrics. In addition, Mendeley, Twitter, and Scopus are chosen as the complementary sources for multi-metrics. We sorted three ranks of the top 50 institutions in the NI China based on citation counts in Scopus, reader counts on Mendeley, and Twitter counts and we analyzed the differences among various ranking results. The diverse metrics revealed different aspects on institutions’ academic impact.