SUNGKYUNKWAN UNIVERSITY (SKKU), SEOUL, KOREA
Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which publishes Nature, the international science weekly, maintains the Nature Publishing Index (NPI) which this year was released on March 21st. According to the NPI 2012, Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) ranked 33rd – jumped up from 63rd last year.
The NPI ranks institutions according to the number of primary research articles that are published in the Nature family of journals. In 2012, SKKU published 10 articles and marked 3.67 in the corrected count (CC) category. CC is based on the relative contribution of each author to each article based on the percentage of authors in the paper's affiliations. Samsung, the strategic partner of SKKU, has been ranked 61st and it is the only corporate ranked among the top 10 Korean institutions.
The NPI 2012 report emphasized that: "SKKU, which is heavily financed by the industrial conglomerate Samsung, leads the world in graphene patent publications." And also stated that: "the country's [Korea] spending on graphene research is greater than that of the entire EU and it is home to seven of the eight researchers with the most graphene-based patents."
