The British Nature Publishing Group has recently announced the Nature Index 2016 Tables, which reveal the global rankings of leading science institutions.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which is comprised of over 100 research institutes, 12 branch academies and 3 universities throughout the country, ranks first for the fourth consecutive year, followed by Harvard University and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

The results are based on a weighted fractional count (WFC) with data collected from January 1 to December 31, 2015.

The Nature Index is a database of author affiliation information sourced from research articles published in an independently selected group of 68 high-quality science journals. It provides a almost real-time proxy for high-quality research output at the institutional, national and regional levels.

The following are the top 10 science institutions in the world.

 University of Cambridge, United Kingdom

WFC 2014: 406.33

WFC 2015: 390.54

Change: -3.9 percent