Seema Singh's post at Mint Blogs had this eye-catching title: IISc is India's Top Ranking Engineering/Technology Institute, so naturally I wanted to see what all the excitement was about.
The source of this excitement is the paper (pdf), Ranking of Indian engineering and technological institutes for their research performance during 1999–2008, in the latest issue of Current Science by Gangan Prathap (Director, NISCAIR) and B.M. Gupta (NISTADS).
Prathap and Gupta use two different metrics to rank institutions: (a) total number of publications during 1999-2008and (b) a new metric called the p-index, defined as (C2 P)1/3 where C is the number of citations received by the papers during a three-year window immediately after their publication.
Here are the top 10 by p-index:
| Rank | Institution | P | p-index |
| 1 | IISc, Bangalore | 12951 | 50.17 |
| 2 | IIT Kanpur | 6234 | 39.27 |
| 3 | IIT Bombay | 7228 | 36.73 |
| 4 | IIT Kharagpur | 7370 | 35.37 |
| 5 | IIT Delhi | 6520 | 32.51 |
| 6 | Jadavpur University | 4807 | 30.30 |
| 7 | IIT Madras | 5715 | 29.09 |
| 8 | IIT Roorkee | 3471 | 25.93 |
| 9 | Anna University | 3687 | 24.54 |
| 10 | IIT Guwahati | 1596 | 19.36 |
I'm not really hot on the ranking part of this exercise; also, I know almost nothing about the p-index (other than the formula), or about why it's better than any other metric for assessing the quality of institutions. So I won't comment on those bits.
But I do want to comment on the validity of comparisons across very many different institutions without taking into account their type, size, age, funding levels, etc:
IISc is an oddball in that list. It's not a predominantly engineering/tech institution. In fact, its science departments are known to have a much stronger publication record than the engineering departments (Giridhar may be able to give some hard numbers to support this point).
So, a direct comparison between IISc and IITs may not be appropriate, unless one does one of the two things: (a) consider only the engineering departments at IISc, or (b) consider only those publications tagged with "engineering" in the Scopus database. Pratap and Gupta may have done (b), but their paper doesn't say so explicitly.
IISc is an oddball from another viewpoint: it's a post-graduate institution. Almost all the others have strong UG programs, with a correspondingly large teaching load on the faculty. Again, a direct comparison is just not right.
From the formula for the p-index, it appears to favour larger institutions with greater faculty strengths. Thus, IIITs (which are pretty small) compare poorly against larger institutions like IITs. I wonder how a normalized p-index data would alter that list.
While Prathap and Gupta have done a great job in collecting the quantitative data, I don't know what to make of (value-laden) statements like these:
Although the NITs have been around for a long time (earlier known as RECs), and have been upgraded to deemed university and institutes of national importance status, their research performance is still dismal. In fact, many Indian engineering and technological universities and private institutes are doing comparatively better in terms of performance. ... In addition, the research performance of the IIITs and NITs is disappointing when compared to that of the technological universities and some select engineering colleges. [bold emphasis added]
But the NITs got the INI status just a few years ago! Until then, they were similar to (at best) the university engineering colleges such as the Guindy Engineering College, Anna University or the Bengal Engineering College (which is now called BESU).
It is inappropriate to compare directly the research performance of an IIT with that, say, of an NIT. This is because NITs (and other engineering colleges) receive much less funding and have much poorer infrastructure.
In addition (and I think this is even more important than funding), the faculty strength at the NITs (and other engineering colleges) is far smaller than that at the IITs. In this post from 4 years ago, I discussed why faculty strength, by itself, is an important factor. Bottomline: If you are running an UG program and if you don't have at least 20 faculty members, you must be deluded to expect significant research output.
8 Comments:
Quick comment on point number 3. IIT Bombay has nearly 1.5--1.7 times the number of faculty members as IIT Kanpur. So, does it mean that the faculty members at IITK are much more productive than those at IITB? :-)
So, does it mean that the faculty members at IITK are much more productive than those at IITB? :-)
@Vishnu: Going by the mighty p-index, the answer is a resounding "Yes!" ;-)
There can be other parameters based on which one can tone down the negative assessment of NITs, IIITs - for e.g. the no. of graduating students continuing to work in core engineering jobs in industry, national labs or getting acceptance to masters/phd programs abroad. Prob. the xtra positive marks to tech. univs and select enggr. college is due to BITS ?
The number of faculty is a significant factor for sure. Most departments in NITs would be hard pressed to have 15 faculty members, let alone 20+
The number of faculty in chemistry, physics and maths in IISc is same as that of any major IIT.
You have to recognize that research, at-least as far as I know, is performed primarily by graduate students. In India, graduate students are second class citizens, attributable to paucity of research opportunities and interesting professors.
As far as the NITs are concerned, its not just the number of faculty, but also the number of PhDs (or some measure of faculty with exposure to research) that is relevant. I graduated from REC Trichy (between 94-98), and not only did the CS Dept. had < 10 faculty, I remember only 3 had PhDs, and a similar number only had BE (and were then doing a Masters).
"From the formula for the p-index, it appears to favour larger institutions with greater faculty strengths. Thus, IIITs (which are pretty small) compare poorly against larger institutions like IITs. I wonder how a normalized p-index data would alter that list."
Greater faculty strengths means nothing, actually the number of faculties publishing citable papers is more important. Size of the citable papers vs. the uncitable papers. For example, JNCASR, which is a science institution and also which is much smaller compared to these institutions has a p-index of 71. This number is far higher than the numbers reported in the article.
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