This is a fairly bizarre way to rank academic institutions. First of all, the methodology almost entirely neglects computer science because its metric of success is papers published in top tier journals; computer scientists tend to submit to conferences (e.g., NeurIPS) and hence get no credit for their work in this count. However, other fields seem over-represented from the list of journals---this is likely why Cold Spring Harbor, a very good biological lab where probably the vast majority of the papers are published in Nature-approved venues seems to be so elite.
The "normalization" they use divides the proportional count of authors that have contributed to an article in the "Nature Index" to the total output of the institution in the sciences, measured by a company called Dimensions. This has the odd effect of penalizing institutions for publishing outside their listed journals.
Finally, as an academic, there are some journals on the index that I have published in, but many venues I have published in did not make their cut. Sometimes more specialized journals are necessary---one cannot easily publish, for example, a detailed proof of a theorem in Nature, even if the result is very important.
The lists, and Nature index, seem like a pretty transparent ploy. Want your institution ranked well? Make sure you publish with us.
Departments and institutions already fret over US News rankings. I wonder if we'll see memos encouraging publication in NPG journals if these rankings become regular.
I was comparing their #1 Cold Spring Harbor Lab to HHMI Janelia Research Campus, which doesn't even seem to be ranked in the top 100. Yet when I look at the research output, it seems pretty similar with the nod to Janelia in terms of FC, top article Altmetric score and article count.
So the denominator for the # of articles per Dimensions must be much higher or N/A and disqualifies some institutions? Unfortunately the Dimensions article count isn't viewable for any institution not making the top 100 list.
Although it's unfortunate to say, but when one makes a big scientific journal, the inclination is to go to one of the top journals (Nature index) before going to journals outside of the listed journals. The reason behind this is that getting a paper in one of those journals is directly related to academic payoff (prizes, promotions, grants). Viewed from this payoff perspective, reason behind this Nature index isn't so unreasonable.
This Nature index would be equivalent to counting the number of papers accepted into the top computer science journals. So yes this index ignores the computer science discipline.
The "normalization" they use divides the proportional count of authors that have contributed to an article in the "Nature Index" to the total output of the institution in the sciences, measured by a company called Dimensions. This has the odd effect of penalizing institutions for publishing outside their listed journals.
Finally, as an academic, there are some journals on the index that I have published in, but many venues I have published in did not make their cut. Sometimes more specialized journals are necessary---one cannot easily publish, for example, a detailed proof of a theorem in Nature, even if the result is very important.
List of journals: https://www.natureindex.com/faq#introduction1