 "Just how did Panjab University emerge as India's top university?")
Did you know it was alumni Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who urged Panjab University to participate in the Times Higher Education Rankings 2013-2014? And it is this very University that has now sprinted ahead of the elite IITs in the global ranking to emerge as India’s best university.
“Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, higher education secretary in the union HRD ministry, Ashok Thakur, and higher education advisor in the Planning Commission, Pawan Agarwal, particularly wanted us to take part and so we did,” Prof Arun K Grover, vice chancellor of PU Grover told The Indian Express after PU was placed in the 226-250 bracket in the ‘Times higher education world rankings, 2013-14’, which was released earlier this week.
The ranking employs thirteen performance indicators to provide comprehensive and objective comparisons, drawn on the basis of feedback from students, academicians, University leaders, industry and government.
[caption id=“attachment_1149547” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Representational Image, Reuters[/caption]
Even though the University fared terribly in the research category, at merely 14 percent, its biggest USP that helped it surpass many leading universities in India was citations. It scored more than 84 percent in this area, while IIT-Kharagpur scored just 35.3, IIT-Kanpur 41.8, IIT-Delhi 38.5 and IIT-Roorkee 53.6.In fact PU even scored higher than the University of Tokyo, Japan ( citation score of 69.8), which has been otherwise ranked 1 in Asia and has a world ranking of 23 as per the Times study.
Citation refers to how widely the university’s research is being used and valued by the academic community around the world.
In other words, Panjab University is the best in Asia when it comes to its research being cited in journals and studies across the globe.
Impact Shorts
More ShortsThe Times website does not disclose theoverall score for PU but it does show that the varsity has been awarded 25.8 for teaching, 29.3 for international outlook, 28.4 for industry income, 14 for research work and 84.7 for citations. ( See the scoring here).
The 13 performance indicators are grouped into five areas:
Teaching: the learning environment (worth 30 percent of the overall ranking score)
Research: volume, income and reputation (worth 30 percent)
Citations: research influence (worth 30 percent)
Industry income: innovation (worth 2.5 percent)
International outlook: staff, students and research (worth 7.5 percent)
Citation impact, research and international outlook together hold over 67 percent weightage in determining the rankings.
However, according to the Times, Citation is the most influential indicator.
“Our research influence indicator is the flagship. Weighted at 30 percent of the overall score, it is the single most influential of the 13 indicators, and looks at the role of universities in spreading new knowledge and ideas.We examine research influence by capturing the number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally. This year, our data supplier Thomson Reuters examined more than 50 million citations to 6 million journal articles, published over five years.
The citations help show us how much each university is contributing to the sum of human knowledge: they tell us whose research has stood out, has been picked up and built on by other scholars and, most importantly, has been shared around the global scholarly community to push further the boundaries of our collective understanding, irrespective of discipline,” it said in its methodology calculation.
Little wonder that Punjab University ranked so high on the list. The Chandigarh-based university has around 3000 research scholars who produce an incredible volume of nearly 500 research papers published annually in international referred journals.In fact, the university has 75 teaching and research departments and 188 affiliated colleges spread over Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh & Regional Centres at Muktsar, Ludhiana and Hoshiarpur.
“PU is no dark horse. We scored way higher than the others in citation impact which means that our faculty and research scholars are producing high quality research that is widely quoted and respected in the global academic community,” Grover told India Today.
And any guesses on famous alumni apart from Manmohan Singh?
From Nasa astronaut Kalpana Chawla to former Prime Minister IK Gujaral and business Tycoon Sunil Mittal, the University boasts of notable leaders from almost every field. ( Read the alumni list here)
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