It Was the God Particle!

The truth about Panjab University's (PU) rise in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings -- and no other -- is revealed in the Times of India.

Shimona Kanwar notes:

"The paper on the discovery of Higgs boson particle better known as the God particle, which earned the Nobel Prize in Physics last year, has come as blessing for Panjab University (PU). PU earned an overall score of 40.2, most of which has been contribution of citations from the university's publications. The paper on the God particle had 10,000 citations, which helped immensely give the numero uno status to PU in the country.
The Times Higher Education Asia University ranking-2014 had four parameters -teaching, international outlook, industry income, research and citations. Out of the 30% score on citations, 84.7 was the top score, which gave the university an edge over the other 21 participating universities. This included Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University, Aligarh Muslim University and IIT Kharagpur among others. Though the CERN project which was associated with the discovery of the God particle involved participation from Delhi University as well, a huge number of PhD students in the project from PU apparently contributed in this rank."We had build parts of a detector, contributed for the hardware, software and physics analysis in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) stage of the God particle discovery," said Prof Manjit Kaur of PU, who was part of the project.
Panjab University had 12-15 PhD students and five faculty members from the department of physics who worked in collaboration for the prestigious project."

A couple of things are missing though. Delhi University (DU) also joined the project but did not even get into the top 100 of the Asian rankings. How come? It wasn't those doctoral students. It was probably (we can't be certain without seeing the scores for all the indicators) because although PU had fewer citations than DU over the relevant period it also had significantly  fewer papers to divide them by.

The trick to getting on in the THE rankings is not just to get lots of citations in the right field and the right year and the right country but also to make sure the total number of papers doesn't get too high.

And, as I noted yesterday, if TR, THE's data collectors, do what they have done for the Highly Cited researchers database and stop counting physics publications with more than 30 affiliations, then PU will almost certainly fall out of the rankings altogether.