| |
"IIT bag third spot in global rankings"
The Times of India,
Times News Network, October 11, 2005
Mumbai:
The IITs have got yet an other round of global recognition, this time from an international panel of academics, for the strength and rigour of their academic programme. The Times Higher rankings, developed by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) in London, ranks the seven IITs at third spot globally, after MIT and University of California, Berkeley. Last year, the IITs were ranked No. 4. This year, they have managed to upstage Stanford University and move one rank higher.
THES started the world University Rankings based on peer review of 2, 375 academics, who are involved in research, in areas like science and technology, biomedicine and humanities.
IITs rank high among peers, but low on research:
IITs secured a high peer score 86.4 in the Times Higher rankings, developed by The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) in London, but have fared poorly in the number of research citations they have received.
In fact, that is true of most of the Asian varsities that rank high on the list – be it Tokyo University or the National University of Singapore. Says THES: “In contrast to sciecne, many technology academics appear rarely in the world’s top research publications. This applies especially to institutions out side the English-speaking world”.
Says Devan Khakhar, dean of faculty, IIT-Bombay: “A lot of our R&D has been targeted towards Indian companies and institutions. This won’t get any research citation.” For instance, both IIT-B and IIT-Kanpur have done a lot of aerospace research for the indigenous Light Combat Aircraft. He adds that in broad subject areas like chemistry, a lot more papers are published in the US. “Leaders in such subject areas are usually in the US and will get more citations that us”, says Khakhar.
Research infrastructure in India is also a major issue. Says Kripa Shankar, deputy director,
IIT-Kanpur: “While research output of IITs is fairly high given the kind of research infrastructure we have, it is probably not as large as the others in the world”.
Home
Page
|
|
