For the fourth consecutive year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) garnered the top spot among global science institutions in the British Nature Publishing Group's prestigious Nature Index.

China placed second after the United States in the British Group's ranking based on countries and regions, reported Xinhua via China Daily.

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The CAS is considered as the world's largest scientific organization, whose membership is comprised of 114 institutions and 48,500 researchers.

The scientists of CAS have so far provided the largest contribution to the high-quality research materials contained in the index, a contribution that has seen a compounded annual growth rate of 6.8 percent since 2012.

Last year, the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Chemistry was one of the largest contributing departments to the institution's weighted fractional count (WFC) -- 1,357.82, which is nearly double the 772.33 output of second-placed Harvard University.

The Nature Index is a database of author-affiliation information gathered from research articles published by an independently selected group of 68 high-quality science journals around the world.

The index has been a highly-reliable source of information in the scientific community, as it provides a close to real-time representation for high-quality research output at the institutional, national and regional levels.

Although the 68 science journals represent less than one percent of the journals covering natural sciences in the Web of Science, they account for about 30 percent of total citations made by natural science journals.

Among the top 10 science institutions in the world are the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the Max Planck Society in Germany, Stanford University in the United States, University of Tokyo in Japan, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge in Britain.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences' achievements are worth noting in light of the high-quality scientific research and significant number of articles published US scientists in 2015, which outpaced the output of every nation that year.

Tagschina, Chinese Academy of Sciences, United States