The sensational fall of Panjab University and the sensational coming rise*

*If present methodology continues

The Hindustan Times has a report on the fall of Panjab University (PU) in the latest THE Emerging Economies Rankings. PU has fallen from 150th in 2019 to 201-250 this year. As expected, rivals and the media have launched a chorus of jeers against the maladministration of a once thriving institution.

But that isn't half of it. In 2014, the first year of these rankings, PU was ranked 14th in the emerging world and first in India ahead even of the highly regarded IITs. Since then the decline has been unrelenting. PU was 39th in 2015, 130th in 2018, 166th in 2020.

Since 2014 PU's scores for Research, Teaching and Industry Income have risen. That for International Outlook has fallen but that did not have much of an effect since it accounts for only 10 per cent of the total weighting.

What really hurt PU was the Citations indicator. In 2014 PU received a score of 84.7 for citations largely because of its participation in the mega-papers radiating from the Large Hadron Collider project, which have thousands of contributors and thousands of citations. But then THE stopped counting such papers and consequently in 2016 PU's citation score fell to 41 and its overall place to 121st. It has been downhill nearly every year since then.

The Director of PU's Internal Quality Assurance Cell said that the university has improved for research and teaching but needed to do better for international visibility and that proactive steps had been taken. The former Vice-Chancellor said that other universities were improving but PU was stagnating and was not even trying to overcome its weaknesses.

In fact, PU's decline had  nothing or very little  to do with international visibility or the policy failures of the administration just as its remarkable success in 2014 had nothing to do with working as a team, the strength brought by diversity, dynamic transformational leadership, or anything else plucked from the bureaucrats' big bag of clichés.

PU bet the farm on citations of particle physics mega-papers and for a couple of years that worked well. But then THE changed the rules of the game and stopped counting them, although after another year they received a reduced amount of credit. PU, along with the  Middle East Technical University and some other Turkish, Korean and French institutions that had overinvested in the CERN projects, tumbled down the THE rankings.

But PU may be about to make a comeback. Readers of this blog will probably guess what is coming next.

When THE stopped favouring papers with thousands of contributors they abolished the physics privilege that elevated places like Tokyo Metropolitan University, Federico Santa Maria Technical University, and Colorado School of Mines to the top of the research impact charts and replaced it with medical research privilege .

In 2018 PU started to publish papers that were part of the Gates-backed Global Burden of Disease Study (GBDS). Those papers have hundreds, but not thousands, of authors and so they are able to slip through the mega paper filter. The GBDS has helped Anglia Ruskin University, Brighton and Sussex Medical School, Aswan University, and Kurdistan University of Medical Sciences rise to the top of the research impact metric.

So far there have not been enough citations to make a difference for PU. But as those citations start to accumulate, providing of course that their impact is not diluted by too many other publications, PU will begin to rise again.

Assuming of course that THE's Methodology does not change.