Six ‘young’ Indian institutes ranked among world’s top 50 for research

Homi Bhabha National Institute, ranked 16th globally, is the top-ranked Indian institution on the list, which also features five IISERs.

The IISER Kolkata campus | IISERKol.ac.in

New Delhi: Six Indian institutes have made it to a list of top 50 ‘young’ universities across the globe that are making high contribution in publishing quality research.

According to the latest Nature Index rankings issued by the Nature Research group, which publishes the leading science journal Nature, among others, Homi Bhabha National Institute (HBNI) in Mumbai is the top-ranked Indian institution on the list.

Established in 2005, the institute is ranked 16th globally.

The rankings are based on a parameter called ‘fractional count’, which takes into account the share of authorship on published articles. For instance, on an article with 10 authors, each writer receives a fractional count score of 0.1.

Institutes are described as young if they were founded as an independent university in 1969 or later.

The rankings are based on the ‘Nature Index’, which is a database compiled by Nature Research on author affiliation information collated from research articles published in an independently selected group of 82 quality science journals. 

ThePrint approached HBNI for comment but there was no response until the time of publishing this report. 

‘We are delighted’

The other Indian institutes in the top 50 were the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) branches at Pune (20), Bhopal (26) and Kolkata (48), and Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research Bengaluru (40). 

“Of course we are delighted. These rankings are research-based and we are particularly proud of research,” said Sunil Mukhi, dean of faculty at IISER Pune. “We would like to do better, our ambition is to be near the top,” Muskhi added. 

“We are actually just 13 years old, so we are a ‘teenage’ university. If you only look at such teenage universities, we would be much higher in the ranking.”  

Mukhi also pointed out that the top universities in the list — University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS), Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) — are extremely well-funded. 

“If you look at the kind of funding we receive from the government — which is frankly quite modest on the world scale — then I think we have done even better,” he said. “If we have to climb up on the scale, the funding has to be much higher.”

Several other Indian institutes were ranked among the top 100 — the University of Hyderabad (63), the IISER branches at Thiruvananthapuram (89) and Mohali (95), and IIT-Indore (100).