Research carried out by SUSTech’s staff, students and alumni has made an enormous impact on the world in 2020. The number of published papers was 4240, reached a new high, with an increase of 55% over last year. Among them, SCI and EI included 3748 papers, including 19 papers in top international journals such as Nature, Science and Cell.

In 2020, the statistics show that SUSTech’s Weighted Fractional Count was 201.54 for the period between 1^st October 2019 to 30^th September 2020, placing it in 14^th position in the Nature Index list of mainland Chinese universities and 52 in the world. This is a significant improvement with an increase of 49 in SUSTech’s position since first being ranked in 2015.

SUSTech’s high quality research output and its increased impact were contributed by the faculty members, including Associate Professor Weishu Liu (MSE) and his research team, in collaboration with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to develop a proof-of-concept wearable device powered by gelatin. This ground-breaking research was published in Science.

Chair Professor Hongwei Guo (Biology) led a multinational research effort to improve the understanding of how RNA interference works in conjunction with the stress response. Their research on this matter, as it related to plant RNA, was published in the high impact academic journal Nature.

As a total, SUSTech’s faculty members have published six high-quality papers in Nature and four in Science. Readers may click the side links for further information on the research outcomes in 2020.

In November 2014, Springer Nature launched a rolling 12-month window of Nature Index data at natureindex.com. The Nature Index database tracks the author affiliations of research articles published in a group of 68 high-quality natural science journals, which have been selected by independent panels of active scientists. On the index website, an institution’s output of articles organized by broad subject area can be viewed across the most recent 12-month period.

The Nature Index uses four counts of article output: Article count (AC), Fractional Count (FC), Weighted Fractional Count (WFC) and Collaboration score (CS). As for WFC, it applies a weighting to FC to adjust for an overrepresentation of papers from astronomy and astrophysics. The four journals in these disciplines publish about 50% of all papers in international journals in this field — approximately five times the equivalent figures for other fields.