Macquarie University is among the top 10 performing Australian universities with the highest outputs among 68 prestigious international journals according to the 2016 Nature Index.

Macquarie was also ranked in the top 400 institutions worldwide (374).

Highlighted in The Australian last week, the index tracks the affiliations of high-quality scientific articles across journals including Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), as well as 19 publications from Nature, and presents research outputs by both institution and country.

The global index counts the total number of author credits garnered by each institution across the past year.

One Macquarie study that appeared in the journal PNAS in 2015 was research by Associate Professor John Alroy in the Department of Biological Sciences, which showed that hundreds of species of frogs have been lost over three decades due to factors such as pollution and habitat destruction.

Associate Professor Alroy also attracted international media coverage for the research – “Current extinction rates of reptiles and amphibians” – in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the International Business Times and the Scientific American.

“Our performance in the 2016 Nature Index is proof of the high quality research Macquarie conducts every year, as the index recognises our acceleration of world-leading and internationally collaborative studies,” said Professor Sakkie Pretorius, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research).

Australia ranked 12 overall globally.