A new index to assess the productivity of the world's top research institutions, developed independently by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Shanghai Information Center for Life Sciences, was launched on Monday.

Known as the "P Index", the metric of research productivity in the field of life and basic medical sciences aims to provide an objective standard based upon an assessment of a select group of scientific journals in which research papers are published and of authors' contributions to such papers.

A report on the research productivity of global life and basic medical sciences institutions was also released. It includes a list of the world's top 100 research institutes that performed best on the P Index last year.

A total of 48 institutions on the list, including Harvard University, the National Institutes of Health, and Stanford University, are in the United States. The United Kingdom comes in second place with 10 institutions while France came in third with eight.

Three institutions in China are on the list: the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University and Tsinghua University.

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