An analysis published in 2014* placed NKI in the top 1% of research institutions worldwide. The authors of this study used the "excellence rate" (the proportion of an institution´s publications which belong to the 10% most frequently cited papers when compared with other publications in the same field and publication year) as an indicator of institutional impact. They then defined percentile tiers (top 1%, top 10%, etc.) to enable simpler comparisons. In this analysis, NKI’s excellence rate placed it in the top 1%, alongside prestigious institutions such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
Measures of institutional research quality can now be viewed using the Mapping Scientific Excellence web application at excellencemapping.net. Here, the excellence rate (now called the “best paper rate”) and the “best journal rate” (the ratio of papers that an institution publishes in the most influential scholarly journals) are used to compare institutions. While the best paper rate gives information about the long-term success of an institution's publications, the best journal rate describes an earlier stage in the process, the ability of an institution to publish its research results in reputable journals. As before, NKI’s excellence indicators place it in the very top tier of research institutions.
* Bornmann, L. and de Moya Anegón, F. (2014), What proportion of excellent papers makes an institution one of the best worldwide? Specifying thresholds for the interpretation of the results of the SCImago Institutions Ranking and the Leiden Ranking. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 65(4), 732-736.