Monday, February 08, 2010

An IIT Figures in Top 20 Most Cited Institutions in Engineering


The February 2010 issue of Science Watch has the list for the 10-year period 1999-2009.

Of greater relevance to India: an IIT makes it to the list at No. 11 with over 25,000 citations and over 7000 publications. The list doesn't specify which IIT it is, but from the context, it appears to be IIT-K. [Correct me if this is wrong].

Update [9 February 2010]: All the five commenters (so far) have pointed out that it's probably the entire IIT system that is at No. 11 in that list. I think they are correct; Ram (in comment #2) is especially persuasive.

The reasoning goes like this: The average number of papers from the five original IITs is between 800 and 1000 per year now, and it was half this number as recently as 6 years ago. The Science Watch article says the analysis is only for 'engineering'; so, it doesn't count papers in 'science'. Heck, its definition of engineering is so narrow that it excludes quite a few engineering disciplines -- for example, my field, metallurgical and materials engineering, doesn't figure in the list. Nor does chemical engineering.

Given these facts, a total figure of 7000 papers in 'engineering' in 10 years makes sense only for the IIT system as a whole, and not for any single IIT.

12 Comments:

  1. Anonymous said...

    Considering IISc is not in the list, the phrase INDIAN INST TECHNOL could imply all the IITs put together. When it comes to numbers, KGP is generally ahead of K, BTW.

  2. Anonymous said...

    Abi:
    I suspect it is all the IITs put together. Note that IIT-KGP, which is teh most prolific of them all, has crossed 1000 publications last year. But that is counting all fields. As one is aware, the publication rate in basic sciences tends to be rather high whereas it is one or two (at the most), on average, per faculty per year in engineering, especially in topics that are considered "pure engineering." (note Mat. sci. and eng. is not there in the list.)
    So, I would think that it is all IITs put together.
    What is interesting to note is that both the Singapore Universities are listed in top ten, ahead of say Cambridge. This could be due to the fact that faculty sizes in these universities are extremely large. For example, NTU's mech. eng. alone had more than 150 faculty!!
    Ram

  3. Anonymous said...

    I think a better metric would be no. of citations/paper normalized over the number of faculty in the university. Since the resutls are by Thomson ISI, it is most likely that "Indian Institute of Technology" refers to the keyword, which = all the IITs taken together.

  4. Anonymous said...

    I think it is all IITs combined. However here the list tends to favor the large schools and does not take into account citations per paper as a ranking measure. Hence you do not see Caltech, Princeton etc in the list.
    Anyway Kudos to the IITs for achieving this inspite of hurdles. It gives a lot of pleasure and stimulus to people like me who are returning to India after spending several years as faculty in the US Universities.

    Dr. Saptarshi Basu

  5. Pratik Ray said...

    I think it is all IITs combined. Given that they classify Chinese Academy of Sciences as one organization (with their multiple institutes) its logical to think its all IITs together.

    But even then, its a nice milestone given that all the IITs combined probably has a number of researchers that is not a significantly bigger than some of the behemoth organizations (Berkeley, MIT, Chinese Academy of Sciences).

  6. Madhan M said...

    There is no doubt it is all IITs put together. Web of Science does not seperate IITs by its locations. I have been analysing bibliometric records collected from Web of Science for many years. I use a special program to seperate IITs
    Science watch is using WoS.

    Madhan, M
    NIT Rourkela

  7. Prashob's blog said...

    its definitely good news ..but a little sad to note that the average citations per paper is the lowest...

  8. Anonymous said...

    It would be interesting to know how the 'new' IITs (IIT roorkee and IIT Guwahati) perform in the same time period. Of course, it won't be a fair comparison at least for IIT Guwahati, since it took a long time to become really functional. Still does anyone know the total no. of publications/citations from these two places?

  9. Ankur Kulkarni said...

    I think their understanding is that the various IITs are different campuses of the same university. The University of Illinois has also been mentioned, but with no mention about the campus, which makes me suspect it is their 3 campuses put together.

  10. pradeepkumar pi said...

    @ Ankur. The contribution of UI campuses at Chicago and Springfield is very little comapred to the one by Urbana-Champaign. The springfield campus is something like a college which run mainly MS programs.

  11. Anonymous said...

    If ranking is done using an energy concept where E=citations*(citations/paper), IIT is last in this list even though it has the largest number of papers (output). Citations are to be considered as outcome (a quantity measure) and citations/paper is a quality measure.


    Rank       Field Papers Citations Citations Per Paper E
    1 UNIV CALIF BERKELEY 4,517 43,003 9.52 409399.60
    2 STANFORD UNIV 3,531 37,086 10.5 389513.28
    3 MIT 4,586 42,264 9.22 389499.72
    4 UNIV ILLINOIS 5,821 44,094 7.57 334011.48
    5 UNIV CALIF LOS ANGELES 2,561 24,991 9.76 243869.61
    6 UNIV MICHIGAN 4,534 30,545 6.74 205777.91
    7 GEORGIA INST TECHNOL 4,803 30,042 6.25 187907.93
    8 UNIV LONDON IMPERIAL COLL SCI TECHNOL & MED 3,555 25,429 7.15 181894.25
    9 UNIV CALIF SAN DIEGO 2,635 20,850 7.91 164980.08
    10 NASA 4,064 24,848 6.11 151924.98
    11 NATL UNIV SINGAPORE 5,031 27,626 5.49 151698.64
    12 PURDUE UNIV 3,765 23,863 6.34 151246.42
    13 CNRS 3,817 23,530 6.16 145051.32
    14 PENN STATE UNIV 3,602 22,464 6.24 140097.53
    15 NANYANG TECHNOL UNIV 5,912 28,516 4.82 137544.36
    16 UNIV WISCONSIN 3,130 20,511 6.55 134409.30
    17 CHINESE ACAD SCI 7,057 29,624 4.2 124356.15
    18 TEXAS A&M UNIV 4,113 20,760 5.05 104784.25
    19 UNIV TOKYO 4,752 21,342 4.49 95850.37
    20 INDIAN INST TECHNOL 7,115 25,386 3.57 90576.11
    SOURCE: Essential Science Indicators from Thomson Reuters.

  12. Anonymous said...

    Is it allowed (legally) to accept an offer from one IIT and then decline it and join another IIT for personal/academic reasons. Has such things happened in IISC and also IITs that you know of.