Excellence and Diversity Mapping of Research in IISc, IITs, NUS and NTU

Abstract

A three-dimensional evaluation approach is used to decompose the research performance of the two leading research clusters from India and Singapore into three components -size, excellence, and balance or evenness. Data are retrieved from the Excellence Mapping web application. The NUS + NTU cluster from Singapore outperforms the IISc + 7IITs cluster from India on all three counts. Keywords: Balance, bibliometrics, excellence, research evaluation, size.A benchmarking exercise on the research performance of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) using Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus bibliometric databases revealed that India's research efforts in engineering have not kept pace with those of more developed countries in the world 1 . Indeed huge investments in just two institutions in Singapore, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have taken them far ahead of all the IITs put together where once, not long ago, they were significantly behind 1 . From the sixties to the eighties, IITs were considered as better destinations for scientific research compared to premier Singapore institutions, namely NUS and NTU. By the late eighties, i.e. sometime around 1987-88, NUS and NTU together began to outperform all the IITs taken together 1 . India has a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) that is 6.6 times that of Singapore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_ (nominal)), and one would expect that the premier grouping of Indian research universities would outperform that from Singapore.In this communication, we revisit the comparison using a three-dimensional framework in terms of size, excellence and diversity of the research base of the premier institutes in India and Singapore. For this, we choose to represent India through the cluster comprising the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and the seven IITs at Kharagpur, Kanpur, Delhi, Chennai, Mumbai, Roorkee and Guwahati (which we collectively call IISc + 7IITs). Singapore is again represented by NUS + NTU cluster. At this level of aggregation, we breakdown scholarly performance into three components -size, excellence and balance or evenness. A web application now available in the public domain permits us to visualize scientific excellence worldwide in several subject areas using this paradigm.The latest and fourth release of the web application

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“…This is representative of the distribution observed in higher educational institutes in India. (Prathap 2017;Chanana 2006) have reported on the marginalized representation of females in teaching and lead-ership profiles in Indian Higher Education institutions and in fact a recent survey 21 from the year 2019-20 amongst Institutes of National Importance in India shows that females occupy only 20% of the teaching positions. Similarly, it has been observed that only 21% of the lecturers in higher education institutes belong to the reserved caste category.…”