The open registry now names 37,982 active research institutions across 225 countries and territories. Mapped together, two patterns stand out: output concentrates in a small set of institutions, and institutions concentrate in a small set of countries.
Output follows a steep curve
Research volume is not spread evenly. The top 100 institutions account for about 18% of all indexed works. The top 500 reach 43%. The top 1,000, around one in forty institutions in the registry, carry 56%. The curve below is cumulative: read it as the share of works held by the most active institutions as you move from left to right.
Cumulative share of indexed works by institution rank
The tail is long but not empty. About 85% of mapped institutions have at least some indexed output, and the median active institution holds roughly 765 works. Volume is a measure of scale, not of quality or integrity. A large count says an institution publishes a lot. It says nothing about whether each result can be trusted, traced, or reproduced. That gap is the reason North Keeper exists.
Volume tells you how much research is produced. It does not tell you how much of it can be verified.
Geography concentrates too
Institutions cluster by country. The ten largest systems hold close to 58% of all mapped institutions, led by the United States with 5,689. Composition is steady across the registry: about 64% are education organizations and 36% are facilities such as national labs, observatories, and research centers.
The Nordic tier
The Nordic countries hold 427 institutions between them: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland. Finland fields 83 institutions and ranks around 40th worldwide by indexed output, led by the University of Helsinki. For a region of its size, the Nordic research base is dense and well indexed, which is part of why North Keeper builds here first.
Nordic institutions by country
Why this matters for universities, funders, and publishers
The same three audiences read this landscape differently. Universities want their output trusted and their integrity provable. Funders want assurance that the work they pay for is reproducible and accountable. Publishers want to verify what they put their name on. A map of who is active is the starting point. The next step is making each institution's research integrity verifiable, record by record. That is the work North Keeper makes possible.
Sources: ROR for the institution backbone and OpenAlex for research output, joined on the ROR identifier. Output is the OpenAlex works_count, a count of indexed works, not a quality measure. One institution with an implausible count is flagged and excluded from these figures. Totals are indicative. Full method and limits are on the map page.