WorldHE NS Watch: MIT Leads a Strong Week for Global University NS Output

Against the backdrop of intensifying global competition in scientific research, publication output in Nature and Science has become one of the key benchmarks for assessing universities’ capacity for original innovation and their international academic influence.

WorldHE continuously tracks the latest and rolling 12-month Nature and Science publication data from universities worldwide, providing a dynamic view of the shifting global higher education and research landscape.

Click here to access the complete university NS publication data.​

Global University NS Publications: September 14–20, 2026

Global university output in Nature and Science remained steady last week, with a total of 37 universities publishing NS papers.

The United States accounted for 13 of these universities, followed by China Mainland with 8. Both remained well ahead of other countries and regions, while the United Kingdom contributed 4 universities, underscoring the continued strength of these major research powers.

Top research universities delivered particularly strong NS output last week. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which recently overtook Princeton University to claim the No. 1 spot in the 2027 U.S. News Best National Universities rankings after Princeton had held the position for 15 consecutive years, published three Nature papers and one Science paper.

MIT was listed as both the first-author and corresponding-author institution on all three Nature papers. The research covered frontier biomedical fields including 2D/3D medical image registration, genome engineering, and pathogen genomic epidemiology, highlighting MIT’s strong research activity in these areas.

Four U.S. universities — Harvard University, University of Washington Seattle, University of California, San Francisco, and Stanford University — each published three NS papers.

Five universities — Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Jilin University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Cambridge, and Zhejiang University — each published two NS papers. Two of these institutions are from China Mainland.

Global University NS Rankings: September 20, 2025–September 20, 2026

Over the rolling 12-month period, 64 universities worldwide have published at least 10 papers in Nature or Science, underscoring the increasingly intense competition for high-impact research.

The composition of the global Top 10 shifted noticeably this period, with five universities from the United States, three from China Mainland, and two from the United Kingdom.

Harvard University continues to lead the global rankings by a wide margin, with 140 NS papers, including 92 in Nature and 48 in Science. Harvard ranks first among all universities in publication output in both journals.

MIT also remains above the 100-paper mark, with 108 papers, ranking second globally. Stanford University follows with 91 papers. Together, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford form a firmly established elite research cluster at the 100-paper level and above.

The University of California, Berkeley ranks fourth with 66 NS papers. While its overall output trails the top three, Berkeley is the only university in the global Top 10 to publish more Science papers (35) than Nature papers (31).

The University of Cambridge overtakes the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences by one paper to rank fifth globally, making Cambridge the highest-ranked non-U.S. university. The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences ranks sixth with 54 papers.

Peking University remains in seventh place with 47 papers. The University of California, San Francisco moves ahead of Tsinghua University with 41 papers, taking eighth place, while Tsinghua ranks ninth with 40.

The University of Oxford returns to the global Top 10 with 36 papers, edging out UCLA to claim the final spot.

Click here to access the complete university NS publication data.​

Methodology

For Nature, only publications classified as Article and Review Article were included. For Science, the analysis includes Research Article, Special-Issue Research Article, and Review.

Only the physically affiliated first author was counted as the first author. All corresponding-author affiliations were included, with each affiliated institution counted once. If the first-author institution and the corresponding-author institution were the same, the publication was counted only once for that institution.

Only formally published articles were included in the analysis. Advance online publications and papers in pre-publication status were excluded.