GoKawiilAn engineer at Japan-based robotics firm Enactic uses a virtual-reality headset to test robotic arms in the company’s office in Tokyo.Credit: Philip Fong/AFP via Getty
China has continued its steep rise in research output, according to Nature Index’s annual rankings, but there is growing evidence that other East Asian countries are also challenging major research nations in Europe and North America.
The Research Leaders tables rank countries and territories according to their contributions to articles published in journals tracked by Nature Index. They show that China’s contribution rose by 22% between 2024 and 2025, far ahead of the rest of the top ten, to extend the country’s lead at the top of the ranking.
Japan and South Korea, which are ranked fifth and seventh, respectively, each posted an increase of almost 10% growth in output according to a metric called Share, which tracks author affiliations on research articles. That’s a bigger increase than higher-ranked Western peers such as the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom (see ‘Relative measures’).
This year’s ranking marks a watershed for the Nature Index, which for the first time has integrated a set of applied-sciences journals into the database, amounting to about 20,000 extra articles in 2025. A number of social-science journals have also been added, representing about 2,000 extra articles. Furthermore, the database has switched to categorizing research disciplines at the article level, rather than by journal, to better reflect the subject mix found in journals. To ensure that year-on-year performance is tracked fairly, however, data from both 2024 and 2025 have been added, and output increases have been calculated against the updated figures.
Mission critical
Increases in Share from 2024 to 2025 should be assessed against the year-on-year growth in the total number of articles in the database. This comes out at 11%, so Japan and South Korea, which each had an increase in Share that was slightly lower than this, lost a little ground to China. Adjusted Share, a metric that accounts for changes in database size, fell by 1% for South Korea and 2% for Japan. But the figures still point to these countries performing much better than large research systems in Europe and North America did: adjusted Share dropped by 6% for the United States and by 7% for Germany and the United Kingdom. Some major Western research institutions also had large drops in adjusted Share from 2024 to 2025, including Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which lost its position as the leading university for Nature Index output to Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.
Nature Index 2026 Research Leaders
For Japan, the encouraging numbers will raise a hopeful question. Is the country’s often-discussed research malaise — represented by sharp falls in its adjusted Share in the Nature Index from 2015 to the early 2020s and concerns over cuts to university funding — beginning to ease? Motoko Kotani, adviser to the president of Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan, says that the numbers do suggest that Japan is adapting to a global research environment that is increasingly tilted towards interdisciplinary, mission-led and computational work.
Kotani traces some of that shift back to a change about ten years ago in how Japanese policymakers framed research. Up to that point, Japan’s science system was often described as siloed and slow to adapt, with universities operating in highly specialized academic enclaves that did not collaborate enough with industry. In the mid-2010s, Kotani says, policymakers started asking what science was really for. “The answer wasn’t scientists,” she says. “It was society.” Once science is framed that way, interdisciplinarity follows, she argues, because “you cannot solve society’s problems with only one discipline”.
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