Chennai: The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras, which was started 55 years ago with German collaboration as a model institute to churn out technologists in the country, has now slipped several places in the world university rankings. Further, it ranks fourth among IITs in terms of research papers published in leading research journals.
IIT-Kharagpur leads the list with 7,719 research papers in the past five years whereas IIT-Madras has produced 6,310 papers. According to Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed scientific journals, books and conference proceedings, faculty at IIT-Madras have published 1,258 research papers in 2010, 1,351 (2011), 1,338 (2012), 1,362 (2013) and 1,001 (so far in 2014).
IIT-Bombay that published fewer research articles (1,128) in 2010 but picked up momentum last year with 1,534 publications totalling to 6,347.
If one looks at highly cited researchers ranking released by Thomson Reuters, one can find only the name of Prof Vinod Kumar Gupta from IIT-Roorkee in the list of IITians. IIT-Madras is also out of the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE)-Advanced toppers radar when it comes to admission to the premier institute.
The first ranking student got admitted to IIT-Bombay and no student in the top 10 slots preferred IIT-M. The institute has also slipped 41 ranks in world university rankings from 281 in 2011 to 322 in 2014.
Even though there could be numerous reasons for this, some faculty and academicians feel that the institute failed to invest in research and development, and in attracting foreign faculty and students.
“It was IIT-Madras which started the institute level research park in the country five years ago but the institute failed to scale up its faculty research, did not bring in a research culture among students to increase research output to match other IITs,” said a faculty.
Another staffer with a similar opinion said that the institute can move up in the rankings if it adds top class researchers to its teaching roster. “We do not need to have Nobel laureates as our faculty but we can collaborate with them to do world class research.
This will help the institute improve its branding, thereby attract top ranking students who will contribute to our research output,” the faculty said.
Prof V.G. Idichandy, professor emeritus at IIT-M’s ocean engineering department says that one of the main reasons for IIT Kharagpur to lead the research ranking could be due to the higher number of faculty than those of other IITs.
“One should compare productivity only in terms of number of research papers per faculty. I am sure that the number must be similar in all IITs. There are also other factors like research that cannot be published due to several reasons,” he said.
Asked for his comments about the trend, Prof. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, IIT-M director gave the same reason. He added, “The sheer number of papers alone is not a good metric, as one can have good papers and poor papers.
One must also look at citations per publication. If we compare this, it is interesting that all IITs almost have the same number (between 6.0-6.6) of citations / publication in the last five years. Even IISc has only 7.3,” he said.
About highly cited research listings, Prof. Ramamurthi pointed out that the list was heavily biased towards the sciences, particularly the biological and medical sciences. “Except for computer science, all other engineering is clubbed into one group. It does not account for the differences among disciplines, but only focuses on the total number of citations.
In any case, I do not see the names of many famous engineering faculty from the top US universities in the list. There is some anomaly in the way they measure. The citations/publication metric, which is used by many ranking agencies, is more useful,” he said.
As IITs could not get a top slot in world university rankings the ministry of human resource development (HRD) along with IIT administrators decided to constitute a committee to frame the much sought- after ranking system exclusively for Indian institutions, during the 48th IIT council meet, which took place in Chennai last month.
