At the beginning of August, the Nature Publishing Group sent out a mail titled “Is your institution a Rising Star?” to all people with an user account at NPG. Interestingly enough, at place 84 of the Nature Index 2016 Rising Stars we find the University of Girona (UdG), as only representative of Spain. The Nature Index is “.. a database of author affiliation information collated from research articles published in an independently selected group of 68 high-quality science journals. The database is compiled by Nature Research. The Nature Index provides a close to real-time proxy for high-quality research output at the institutional, national and regional level.” It is updated monthly with articles from 68 journals, which were chosen by researcher panels since although they represent less than 1% of the journals covering natural sciences, these 68 journals account for ca. 30% of total citations. At present, the UdG has a total of 27 articles listed in the Nature Index, which amount to a total of 11.06 weighted fractional counts (WFC);§ data from November 2016.
The majority of the papers in the Nature Index result from Chemistry (see Figure), with a WFC of 10.57 (96% of total of UdG). Of these, a total of 9.31 WFC is resulting directly from the IQCC (84% of total of UdG). Since the Nature Index is updated monthly, the absolute values of the WFCs vary constantly, but in the past years the contribution of the IQCC to the UdG-score in the Nature Index has been constantly high (between 80-99%). This positive impact of the institute is recognized positively, as for instance recently at the opening of the Second Supramolecular Symposium by the Vice-Rector of Research Dr. Jordi Freixenet, who congratulated the IQCC researchers on the scientific output of high quality that is achieved.
Therefore, as Director of the IQCC I would like to thank all current and past researchers of the institute for the wonderful work they have been doing, are doing, and will be doing. Furthermore, I want to congratulate you all for being the main contributor to the presence of the UdG in the Nature Index, and I am convinced that if we continue working as we are now the scientific output will remain high, and of high quality.
Thank you all and congratulations!
Marcel Swart, Director IQCC
(November 2016)
§ like any other index, also the Nature Index has its peculiarities. The weight of researchers is divided over the different affiliations that the researchers belong to. For instance, as ICREA Research Professor my scientific contributions are equally contributed to ICREA, IQCC (UdG) and Departament de Química (UdG). The latter two add up to the total of the UdG, but for ICREA it means that its scientific output is severely undervalued (by a factor two to three). Its WFC of 19.80 (November 2016) and the corresponding 11th position of research outputs in Spain is therefore a severe underestimate of the true research outputs by ICREA Research Professors.