It is Panjab University, which has come from nowhere to seize the 245th place.
NDTV thinks that it is something to do with a meeting last May.
"The increased representation for India in the rankings has been attributed to a two-day National Policy Dialogue in May on international rankings, when representatives of Times Higher Education were invited to meet with senior university leaders by India's Ministry of Human Resources Development and Planning Commission."
Someone at the MHRD thinks it is all about presenting the data to Thomson Reuters.
'“It is not that Panjab university has done significantly very well this year. The way we see it is that, they may have been able to present their data and information in a better and convincing way. The vice-chancellor himself is a researcher and he may have taken the effort to logically present the data," said a senior MHRD official.'
Phil Baty of THE is more helpful.
"Panjab University has done well in citation impact with good scores indicating that its academics are producing research which is widely used and valued by the academic community around the world as per Phil Baty, editor, Times Higher Education World University Rankings. He said that Panjab University though has not fared well on the research front. According to him, Indian Institutes have done well this year"
This is what actually happened. Panjab University performed poorly for Teaching, International Outlook and Industry Income - Innovation. It performed very poorly for Research with a score of 14 but "brilliantly" for Citations with a score of 84.7.
Panjab University's citations score is very largely due to its participation in the Large Hadron Collider project, which involves more than 2000 physicists in more than 150 research centers and 37 countries. Below is the list of physicists. Somewhere in there is someone from Panjab University. The publications related to the project are widely cited. For most universities this brings little benefit since the citations are spread out over many publications. PU, however, has a relatively limited research output so those citations lead to a very high mean citations per paper (normalised for field and year) and thus to a very high score, after adding in the regional modification.
So if Indian universities want to do well in the Rankings this is one way. Don't do too much research and get on the LHC project or something similar.
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