ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects in Engineering (2020)

ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2020 (GRAS 2020) was released on Monday, June 29, 2020 at Shanghai, People's Republic of China by ShanghaiRanking Consultancy. Since 2009, ShanghaiRanking Consultancy (SRC) has published the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) by academic subjects. Rankings are made in 54 subjects across Natural Sciences, Engineering, Life Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Social Sciences. More than 4000 universities were ranked and of these more than 1800 from 90 countries and regions appear a total of 19100 times on the league table. Universities from the United States appear 4826 times, followed by Chinese universities (2647 times) and universities from the United Kingdom (1607 times). University of British Columbia, the University of New South Wales, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, The Ohio State University-Columbus, The University of Melbourne and McGill University are presented on the league table in more than 50 subjects, more than any other universities. The Engineering rankings are available for twenty-two engineering subjects (the list is shown in Table 1).

Table 1. The 22 subject areas in the engineering field and the universities

ShanghaiRanking Consultancy uses a transparent methodology and third-party data. Ranking indicators include those measures of research productivity, research quality, extent of international collaboration, research with top quality, and the highest academic recognitions. In GRAS 2020, the ‘PUB’ indicator is replaced by the ‘Q1’, defined as the number of papers authored by an institution in an Academic Subject in journals with Q1 Journal Impact Factor Quartile in order to encourage research with high quality. The bibliometric data are from Web of Science and InCites database produced by Clarivate Analytics.

The ranking indicators are:

Q1 The number of papers published in Q1 Journal Impact Factor Quartile in an Academic Subject

CNCI Category Normalized Citation Impact from InCites to measure average impact of papers authored by an institution in an Academic Subject

IC The percentage of internationally co-authored papers authored by an institution in an Academic Subject

TOP The number of papers published in top journals and conferences in an Academic Subject

AWARD The total number of the staff of an institution winning a significant award in an Academic Subject

SRC uses a weighting system that allocates different weights for different subjects. For each indicator, scores for institutions are calculated as a percentage of the top scoring institution, then the square root of the percentage is multiplied by the allocated weight. A final score is arrived by adding scores for all indicators and the final score is ranked in descending order. We shall call these the SR Ranks. In the present analysis, we shall focus on the research performance aspect of the Indian institutions in the Shanghai Rankings for Engineering. Q1 (as a zeroth-order size-dependent measure of quantity of output) and TOP/Q1 (as a measure of quality or excellence of output) allows us to compute X = TOP**2/Q1 as a second-order composite indicator of performance. Note that although TOP is a quantity measure, the ratio of TOP/Q1 is a good proxy for the quality of research.

We shall re-rank the institutions in descending order and call these the X-ranks. Note that if an institution has both Q1 and TOP equal to 100, X is 100. However, this does not mean that X cannot exceed 100! For example, in Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology has an SR Rank of 8 has a Q1 = 36.0 and a TOP = 100.00 yielding an X = 277.78. This takes it to the top position in the X-rank league! Beihang University was ranked No. 1 in the Shanghai Rankings for Aerospace Engineering. However, with Q1 = 100 and TOP = 90.4, its X = 81.72 moves it to a modest 26th rank. This is not surprising as the second-order indicator rewards high quality and punishes poor quality because of the quadratic term assigned to the quality proxy. Table 1 shows what happens to the No. 1 position when the X-ranks are used instead of the SR-ranks for all all the 22 subjects in the engineering field. We think that this gives a better picture than the weighting scheme used by SRC if our attention is to be restricted to research performance alone.

Results and Discussions

Universities from India which have been ranked by SRC in 22 engineering subjects are now assigned X-ranks as indicated above. In 2020, India has a presence in seventeen of the twenty-two subject areas in which there are institutes globally that meet the required threshold for that area. It has no institution which can be counted at this level of size and excellence in five subjects in the Engineering field: Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Environmental Science & Engineering, Remote Sensing and Transportation Science & Technology. India’s engineering research base is skewed towards hard-core areas, e.g. Chemical Engineering (18 institutions), Energy Science & Engineering (11) and Mechanical Engineering (11).

We have tracked the appearance of the 29 universities or institutions which have appeared in the SRC GRAS in Engineering over the last three years in Table 3. The Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR) makes an impressive new entrance into the list for the first time in 2020, in five subject areas. In two areas, Biomedical Engineering and Remote Sensing, no institution features in any of these three years. The IIT at Kharagpur showed up in 16 areas in 2018, but this has come down to 14 and 13 in 2019 and 2020 respectively. In the same manner the Indian Institute of Science count has diminished from 13 to 11 and 10 respectively over the years. The IITs at Delhi (12,10,10)), Madras (12,12,10), Bombay (11,10,11), Roorkee (9,7,5) also appear to show a similar decline. Anna University (10,5,3) and Jadavpur University (7,5,3) have registered similar trends. Relative to the IITs, these are state universities with vastly limited funding. Thapar University (3,5,3) and Vellore Institute of Technology (1,2,3) are the only private universities that make it to this class. If totals are aggregated, from 2018 to 2020, the Indian presence in GRAS for Engineering has steadily declined from 124 in 2018 to 107 in 2019 and 105 in 2020.

Table 2. The engineering subjects in which Indian universities have been ranked by SRC.

Table 2. The engineering subjects in which Indian universities have been ranked by SRC (contd.).

Conclusions

The SRC Subject Rankings 2020 has been recently released. We use the data to see how Indian Higher Educational Institutions have fared in the Engineering field over the last three years. The Indian Institute of Science and the older Indian Institutes of Technology stand out among Indian counterparts but are far below global competitors. In two subjects: Biomedical Engineering and Remote Sensing, it has no institution which can be counted at this level of size and excellence in any of the three years. India’s engineering research base is skewed towards hard-core areas like Chemical Engineering (18 institutions), Energy Science & Engineering (11) and Mechanical Engineering (11).