ShanghaiRanking's Global Ranking of Academic Subjects 2020 in the Sciences

Introduction

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. Across four major Science fields: Natural Sciences, Life Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Social Sciences, there are thirty-two subjects  (the list is shown in Table 1). 

We compare the performance of Indian Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs) in the Sciences in the Shanghai Rankings 2020 with that in 2018.

Methodology

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. Unlike GRAS 20181, where the ‘PUB’ indicator was used, in GRAS 2020, this 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 in 2020 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 (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 in 2018, X  = TOP**2/PUB was used as the second-order composite indicator of performance.

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 Biological Sciences, Harvard which has an SR Rank of 1 has a Q1 = 100.0 and a TOP = 100.00 yielding an X = 100. This does not take it to the top position in the X-rank league, it is in fact the 7th Rank! The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor was ranked No. 32 in the Shanghai Rankings for Biological Sciences. However, with Q1 = 13.30         and TOP = 54.4, its X = 225.51 moves it to the first 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 proxy2. Table 1 shows what happens to the No. 1 position globally when the X-ranks are used instead of the SR-ranks for all the 32 subjects in the sciences fields. 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. 

Table 1. The 32 subject areas in the four science fields and the No. 1 universities from the SR rankings and the X-Ranking protocol respectively.

Results and discussions

Tables 2 onwards show the comparative presence of Indian universities in the four major science fields in 2018 and 2020. Some institutions fade away while new ones appear. In 2020 India has a presence in only seventeen of the thirty-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 fifteen subjects (Agricultural Sciences, Biological Sciences, Business Administration, Communication, Dentistry & Oral Sciences, Education, Finance, Hospitality & Tourism Management, Law, Library & Information Science, Nursing, Oceanography, Psychology, Public Administration, and Sociology.) As in 2018 India’s science research base is mainly skewed towards the natural sciences and mathematics areas. Even here, it has no presence in Oceanography. Only Panjab University has managed to get into the Top 100 in Physics when X-ranks are considered. 

Its performance in the life sciences and medical sciences fields is passable. Of the six areas in the latter, it has no presence in Dentistry & Oral Sciences and Nursing. In the Social Sciences field, out of fourteen subject areas, it does not have a single institution in ten areas: Business Administration, Communication, Education, Hospitality & Tourism Management, Finance, Law, Library & Information Science, Psychology, Public Administration, and Sociology. In the Life Sciences, no institution is found in two of the four areas.

Table 2. The number of Indian universities which have been ranked by SRC in Natural Science subjects.

Table 3. The number of Indian universities which have been ranked by SRC in Life Science subjects.

Table 4. The number of Indian universities which have been ranked by SRC in Medical Science subjects.

Table 5. The number of Indian universities which have been ranked by SRC in Social Science subjects.

Conclusions

The SRC Subject Rankings 2020 which has been recently released permits us to find how Indian Higher Educational Institutions have fared in the four main Science fields: Natural Sciences, Life Sciences, Medical Sciences, and Social Sciences,  India has a presence in only seventeen of the thirty-two subject areas in which there are institutes that meet the SRC standards of excellence. It has no institution which makes the mark in fifteen subjects. India’s science research base is mainly skewed towards the natural sciences and mathematics areas. Its performance in the medical sciences field is passable and that in the social and life sciences continues to be very dismal. It therefore has a long way to go to meet global standards. There is no significant change from its earlier position in 2018.