Nature Index 2020: An Overview of the Scientific Content and Research Output in Cancer Research for 200 Institutions and a Guide to Online Online Features
A description of the terminology and methodology used in this supplement, and a guide to the functionality that is available free online at natureindex.com.
Cancer research is important to many institutions because it contributes a large slice of the overall research output. The chart below shows Share against the amount of cancer research for the leading 200 institutions in the topic.
The adjusted share reflects the small variation in the total number of articles. It is arrived at by calculating the percentage difference in the total number of articles in the Index in a given year relative to the number of articles in a base year and adjusting Share values to the base year levels.
The bilateral collaboration score (CS) between two institutions A+B is the sum of each of their Shares on the papers to which both have contributed. There is a limit on the number of articles that can be co-authored by any two institutions or countries.
Each query will return a page with the country or institution’s recent outputs, which can be used to find more information. It is possible to display articles by journal and article. The research outputs are categorized into areas. The pages list the country’s top collaborators, as well as its relationship with other organizations. Users can track an institution’s performance over time, create their own indexes and export table data.
The leading institutions in cancer research are ranked by the number of articles they have in the topic between the years of this supplement. Also listed are each institution’s total cancer article count (Count) and proportion of cancer Share relative to total Share (Cancer %) over the same period. Different from the Nature Index 2020 Cancer supplement, joint institutions with more than one participating partner, such as the Broad Institute under Harvard and MIT, were incorporated into the output of their partners, to be consistent with standard practice for Nature Index.
An Artificial Intelligence-powered device to support the cancer screening in Africa: Namisango, Uganda, the UK, and the African Palliative Care Association
With colleagues in Uganda, the United Kingdom and Zimbabwe, Namisango won a £180,000 (US$235,000) grant from the Medical Research Council, one of the United Kingdom’s national science funders, which enabled them to interview patients, caregivers and health-care professionals as part of a study into what patient-centred care might look like in Africa, and how it can be implemented. According to the African Palliative Care Association, a non-profit organization based in Uganda that works to integrate care for the dying into health care systems across Africa, they were grateful to get the grant.
Research has not kept up with Africa’s cancer crisis. Africa produced more research on infectious diseases than they did on cancer between 2009 and 2020 according to a study by a breast surgical oncologist. The number of African cancer papers did increase rapidly over this time, by about 15% annually, but authorship was concentrated in the richest African countries: Egypt published nearly half (48%) of Africa’s cancer papers and South Africa and Nigeria produced 14% and 6%, respectively.
One way of dealing with the uneven playing field is to design new collaborations between African researchers and colleagues in high-income countries. According to Rubugumya, a lead author of the 2023 study, there is a vicious cycle of challenges in the research environment that leads to an imbalance towards high-income nations.
The development of tools to help health-care personnel in Africa access specialist expertise is being made by Kabukye. A tool was developed by Kabukye and his colleagues with help from the Swedish Program for ICT in Developing Regions, a research centre at the Royal Technical University in Stockholm, to improve the effectiveness of cervical-cancer screening. In Africa, cancer screening can be done with the naked eye, rather than using a lab-based PAP test, as it’s common in high-income countries. The system allows non-specialists to access a second opinion from gynaecologists via an app on their phone, even if they carry out the screening with a specialist. Users can also access artificial intelligence-powered analysis, which compares their observations with thousands of medical images. The device was deployed on a trial basis at the Uganda Cancer Institute and four satellite clinics across the country in 2019–21, and is described in a 2023 preprint6.
The five leading institutional pairs in cancer research are domestic partnerships. The Chinese Academy of Sciences has seen a rapid increase in collaborative articles with the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
According to data, the European Commission allocated more than 1,300cancer research grants over the course of the next five years. The European Research Council, another beneficiary of Horizon money, funded grants worth around $850 million.
Some outliers are highlighted in the chart below. The specialist cancer centres have a high amount of Nature index output related to cancer research. Two of the United States’s specialist institutions can be found in New York City and Houston, but they are not on Share.