Hyderabad, October 05: Just a handful of Indian universities manage to be included in the various international ranking systems that exist today which not only consider the quality but also the quantity of scientific research.
In this fortnight’s issue of Current Science, Gangan Prathap and colleagues propose a new system of ranking for Indian universities based on the data from SCOPUS.
“The procedure proposed identifies the indicators that are best correlated with each other and then uses a composite indicator emerging as a product of these as a single indicator that combines quality with quantity.”
Researchers have ranked top 25 univeristies based on their scientific output between 1999 and 2008 and Hyderabad University comes atop.
This finding will no doubt create some debate in the academic circle as many professors of the Central University of Hyderabad have complained of not getting their due in terms of recognition and grants since they are far away from the power centres in Delhi.
Among other things, one interesting finding is that no private university has made to this elite list. (If I can play devil’s advocate, it’s only recently that a few seemingly good private universities have sprung up.)
The study finds these universities had each published more than 1,200 papers during this period , according to publication data downloaded from the Scopus International multidisciplinary bibliographical database. Together, they contributed 59,685 papers, constituting 18% papers to the total cumulative research output by India during 1999–2008. The publication share of these 25 universities to the total output by India showed an increase from 17.48% (22,173 papers) in 1999–03 to 18.31% (37,512 papers) in 2004–08.
But what a minuscule increase compared to what some other countries, esp China, have achieved in recent years.
Here’s the ranking; to know how it’s done please read the paper.
1 — University of Hyderabad
2 — Delhi University
3 — Panjab University
4 — Jadavpur University
5 — Banaras Hindu University
6 — University of Madras
7 — Sanjay Gandhi PGIMS
8 — Jawaharlal Nehru University
9 — Pune University
10 — Anna University
11 — Annamalai University
12 — University of Rajasthan
13 — Guru Nanak Dev University
14 — CMC Vellore
15 — University of Calcutta
16 — Aligarh Muslim University
17 — University of Mumbai
18 — Madurai Kamaraj University
19 — Shri Venkateswara University
20 — Cochin University of S&T
21 — University of Mysore
22 — Osmania University
23 — Andhra University
24 — CCS Haryana Agricultural University
25 — Punjab Agricultural University
A few weeks ago the same group had ranked India’s technical institutes and IISc emerged on top. A blog post on that on Lab Rats created some buzz and comments came thick and fast. Keep them coming this time too!
-Agencies