The Nature Index, a ranking that tracks contributions to peer reviewed scientific journals, shows both countries posting nearly 10% year over year growth in 2025, outpacing the U.S., Germany and the U.K.
Japan has reversed what had been a long-running decline in scientific-journal contributions, according to the latest Nature Index data, in a shift that coincides with a $63 billion endowment-style research fund the government created in 2023.
The Nature Index, a research-output ranking maintained by the publisher Nature, tracks contributions to a curated set of peer-reviewed journals. In its 2025 release, Japan posted nearly 10% year-over-year growth and rose to fifth place globally, its highest position in years. South Korea, ranked seventh, posted similar growth and now sits close behind sixth-ranked France. Both countries outpaced the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom on year-over-year journal-contribution growth.
The Japanese fund, structured to mimic the long-horizon investment model used by U.S. university endowments, was layered with salary increases for academic researchers, expanded early-career support, and deregulation of university spin-offs, all long-standing friction points in the Japanese system. Whether the policy package caused the reversal, or merely coincided with it, remains an open question. Japan had been losing share for a decade before the fund was created.
South Korea has been running a different experiment for longer. Research and development spending has run at a high share of gross domestic product for years, well above most OECD peers, the group of mostly wealthy economies. The Nature Index data does not break out whether South Korea's gains are concentrated in basic or applied research, but the country's applied-sciences contributions, a category Nature Index added to its database this year, are now growing at a rate consistent with the rest of its research output.
China remains the clear leader. China's share of journal contributions jumped by nearly 10,000 between 2024 and 2025, a 22% increase, and nearly every country lost ground relative to China because of the gap in growth rates. The United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom were specifically outperformed by Japan and South Korea on year-over-year increases.
The Nature Index is one of several research-output rankings; others include Scopus, the CWTS Leiden Ranking, and Clarivate's Web of Science. Share-of-journal-contributions is a directional measure, not a complete accounting of research output, citations, or clinical and commercial impact. This year's release also incorporated 22,000 more articles than the previous year, after Nature Index folded in applied-sciences and social-sciences journals into its database, a methodology change that improves coverage but limits strict year-over-year comparability.
What the data does support is this: Japan and South Korea have each posted nearly 10% growth in scientific-journal contributions in a year when most Western incumbents did not. The 2023 endowment-style fund is the most concrete policy lever that distinguishes Japan's approach from peers. Whether it survives a global funding pullback, or fades as a one-year anomaly, is the watch item for 2026.