New Delhi: Faculty with doctoral qualifications are mostly concentrated in top 100 institutions in the country, according to the National Institutional Ranking Framework’s (NIRF) 2023 report.
The authors of the report, which rates higher education institutions under various categories, said they found such “interesting and useful insights” from the data collected for rankings.
The study said: “Data on publications, citations and patents was taken from Scopus (Elsevier Science), Web of Science and Derwent Innovation (Clarivate Analytics). Besides using this data for ranking of institutions, the combined collection of data for all eligible institutions offers a unique opportunity for analysis and to get interesting and useful insights.”
For the research, the report utilised data from the 2019-2021 academic years.
As per the information, 73.6% of the faculty in the country’s top 100 universities have a Ph.D as compared to 64.29% in the remaining ranked by the NIRF.
The discrepancy is glaring in engineering institutes where over 81% of the faculty in top 100 colleges have a Ph.D against 35% in the rest.
Among colleges, teachers with doctorate degrees in the top 100 are 61.06% of the faculty, while that number is 44.63% in those below.
The report says: “It was observed that faculty with doctoral qualification is concentrated in top 100 institutions, while the remaining institutions have fewer faculty with doctoral degrees. This is a serious handicap since mentorship received during the doctoral training can play a vital role in preparing the faculty for a teaching career in higher education.”
Similar trends have been observed with research publications and citations as well, with the maximum number of publications and citations coming out only from the top 100 institutions.
Data showed that from 2019 to 2021, the total number of publications from universities were 280,643 of which 69.37% (194,685) were from the top 100 institutes. The remaining 30.63% — which make up for 85,958 publications — were from institutes ranked lower than 100.
In engineering, the report found that IITs published nearly 35.17% of research articles in the top 100 institutes. These were followed by NITs with 18.42% and deemed-to-be-universities with 16.07%.
For citations, the top 100 in the university category published 70.7% papers.
In the engineering discipline, the top 100 had 66.15% citations, while that figure was 64.39% in the overall category.
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