Tuesday, September 14, 2010

From the latest issue of Current Science: Scientometric Analysis of Indian Science


Scientometric analysis of some disciplines: Comparison of Indian institutions with other international institutions is the title of this fairly extensive study (pdf) by K.. P. Raghuraman, Romesh Chander and Giridhar Madras, who are all with the National Centre for Science Information at IISc. [Many of you may also know Giridhar Madras as the man behind the the blog Life in IISc.]

The paper appears in the latest issue of Current Science. Here's the abstract (with paragraph breaks introduced to enhance readability):

We have carried out a three-part study comparing the research performance of Indian institutions with that of other international institutions.

In the first part, the publication profiles of various Indian institutions were examined and ranked based on the h-index and p-index. We found that the institutions of national importance contributed the highest in terms of publications and citations per institution.

In the second part of the study, we looked at the publication profiles of various Indian institutions in the high-impact journals and compared these profiles against that of the top Asian and US universities. We found that the number of papers in these journals from India was miniscule compared to the US universities.

Recognizing that the publication profiles of various institutions depend on the field/departments, we studied [in Part III] the publication profiles of many science and engineering departments at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, the Indian Institutes of Technology, as well as top Indian universities. Because the number of faculty in each department varies widely, we have computed the publications and citations per faculty per year for each department. We have also compared this with other departments in various Asian and US universities. We found that the top Indian institution based on various parameters in various disciplines was IISc, but overall even the top Indian institutions do not compare favourably with the top US or Asian universities.

The comparison groups of institutions include MIT, UMinn, Purdue, PSU, MSU, OSU, Caltech, UCB, UTexas (all from the US), National University of Singapore, Tsing Hua Univerrsity (China), Seoul National University (South Korea), National Taiwan University (Taiwan), Kyushu University (Japan) and Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The authors have also compared the performance of top Indian Institutions with that of the universities in the comparison group in a bunch of fields: physics, chemistry, chemical, electrical, civil and mechanical engineering.

These two sentences in the abstract are worth repeating:

... [T]he number of papers in these [high impact] journals from India was miniscule compared to [that from] the US universities.

... [O]verall even the top Indian institutions do not compare favourably with the top US or Asian universities.

2 Comments:

  1. batt said...

    i think they should have included another parameter...

    "total money spent per publication"

  2. Nappinnai NC said...

    Prof Kumaran(Chem Engg. IISc) has a sexy publication meaning high impact journals. His boss Kock(Cornell) is another smart guy, who has joint publications with GK Batchelor, Cambridge,the Legend in Fluid Mechanics. Dr Kumaran follows a 'typical' Cambridge course of Fluid Mechanics. Same course used to be offered in Aerospace also but was only 'so-so'.

    India needs to overhaul the educational system and eliminate all programs that don't work. This is the only way, we can have quality education. Its caught in the stupid caste systems and politicans exploit this to dupe the illiterates.

    I remember Feynman's personal experience with the educational board of State of Calif. to revise the Math & Phy books at high school level. He got highly pissed off with the way the subjects were handled by teachers and they didn't even listen to a Nobel Laureate's suggestion. What makes anything & everything go? 'Energy makes it go' book pissed Feynman to the core and after that experience, he never ever participated in such craps...