Research output of Indian institutions seen from the lens of citations in Indian journals
There are several rankings available globally which look at the relative positions of academic institutions from different angles. They make use of various kinds of parameters and matrices to arrive at a particular order of ranking of institutions. For the first time in India, a ranking has been done of academic institutions on the basis of citations of their research papers in Indian journals. The report containing these rankings, called “Landscape of Research Output of Universities and Other Research Institutions in India: A Report Based on Indian Citation Index” was released at the higher education summit of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in New Delhi on Thursday.
Conceptualised by CII and created by the Indian Citation Index (ICI), which is a “home grown abstracts and citation database, with multidisciplinary subjects”, the report provides a comprehensive analysis of the range and depth of Indian scholarly articles.
The report groups IITs established before 2000 under a separate category. These IITs contributed 9202 research articles and received 4190 citations in journals published from India between 2004 and 2014. In productivity ranking, IIT Kharagpur stood at number one with a contribution of 1794 research articles, followed by IIT Delhi at second position with 1496 research articles and IIT Roorkee at third position with 1427 research articles.
On the parameter of quality, i.e., number of citations received against the number of research papers produced, IIT Delhi stood at first position with 912 citations against 1496 research papers, followed by IIT Kharagpur at second position with 989 citations against 1794 research papers. IIT Roorkee was at third position on this parameter also with 616 citations against 1427 research papers.
Commenting on the report, Mr Vijay Thadani, Chairman, CII National Committee on Higher Education Vice Chairman & Managing Director – NIIT & Co-Founder, NIIT University said, “While most international indices look at citation count in international journals, citations in local journals often get overlooked. A citation index for Indian journals has been the crying need of the hour and I am happy to see this need fulfilled.”
He said the timing for such a study was ripe since India was now working on its own national rankings of academic institutions. While they would cover all aspects of higher education, from both input and output side, indices of the kind presented in this report will provide another, supplementary perspective on Indian institutions. The analysis groups institutions of similar lineage and size, such as IITs, NITs, Central Universities, State Public Universities, Deemed Universities and State Private Universities.
The report also shows that ‘Engineering Science and Technology’ and ‘Chemistry’ are the two subjects where all IITs have made good, consistent, and visible contribution relative to other subject categories. IIT Roorkee tops in this category with 470 research papers, followed by IIT Madras with 425 research papers, and IIT Kharagpur with 404 research papers.
China tops the list of countries which have joint papers published in Indian journals with a count of 14790. The United States is at number 2 with 14363 joint papers, followed by Iran at number 3 with 12131 papers. At subsequent positions are Nigeria (6966), Turkey (6954), United Kingdom (5369), Malaysia (4223), Saudi Arabia (3801), Egypt (3446), South Africa (2840), Japan (2793), Canada (2585), South Korea (2516), Pakistan (2438), Australia (2415), Germany (2399) and Bangladesh (2346) while rest have less than 2000 collaborative articles in journals of Indian origin.
The articles published from India in Indian and foreign journals are 52.35 per cent and 47.76 per cent, respectively. The report also defines the characteristics of ‘International’ and ‘National’ or Local journals to remove existing misconceptions of the people and sets out the required quality parameters of scholarly works.
New Delhi
3rd December 2015