Identifying the Institutional Shifts in Contribution to Indian Research Output

INTRODUCTION

India has now emerged as a major knowledge producer, with some reports indicating that it ranks at third place in research output after the United States of America (USA) and China (National Science Board, 2021, DST R&D Statistics Report 2021-22, Singh et al., 2020). This research output is contributed by a diverse set of institutions, ranging from centrally funded to state funded, and from public funded to private funded institutions. In fact, a recent study suggested that a majority of research publications in India are produced by the centrally funded institution systems (67.58%), which include, Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Institutions of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), Central Universities, Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) institutions, National Institutes of Technology (NITs), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), and Department of Science and Technology (DST) institutions. In contrast, all other sources (state universities, private universities, Industry etc.) together account for the rest 32.42% of the publications (Kanaujia et al., 2022). Some other studies have also identified the major institutions and systems contributing to Indian research output. For example, Prathap (2014) identified the role of several elite institutions (also recognised as Institutes of National Importance) as contributors to Indian research output.

A significant change has been witnessed in the research and development activities of the Indian institutional actors during the last two decades. The CII-ICI report 2016 on research productivity of Indian universities underlined the increase in the number of private universities and a shift in their focus towards research activities as well. A look at the number of universities in India shows that the number of private universities has increased from a few private universities in 2003, to about 261 (in 2014) and about 430 (in 2023), state universities increased from 183 (in 2003) to 316 (in 2014) and 460 (in 2023), and Central Universities increased from 18 (in 2003), and 43 (in 2014) to 56 (in 2023) (AISHE, 2014-15; 2021-22; University Grants Commission, 2003; 2023). The number of Institutes of National Importance (INIs) also increased from 75 (in in 2014) to 153 (2022). The most notable growth, however, is in the number of private Universities. Prathap and Sriram, (2017) while analysing the performance of selected private universities between 2013-2016, noted that while several of them had more than three times the number of faculty staff, and similar overall budget as that of IISc (the leading Institutes of National Importance in the period), their spending per faculty was much lower and the research activities were much less efficient resulting in lower publication output. However, a later study noted that some of the private universities are on the path towards positioning them as more research and innovation driven institutions (Banshal et al., 2019).

The recently released NIRF rankings 2024 reflects a share of 23.48% publications by the private institutions/universities, and a share of 6% by the State Private Universities, in the national research output specifically from top 100 ranked institutions in National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) (Department of Higher Education, 2024). These changes suggest a possible shift in the direction of the academic ecosystem of the country, where new universities/institutions may become important in terms of research publications. Some other recent studies have also indicated that the rate of publication output of some of the major institutions have slowed down in the past few years, and several new research institutions have come to the fore in the R&D landscape (Kanaujia et al., 2022; 2023).

However, there is a lack of sufficient empirical analysis of the transition in Institutional R&D activities. The extent to which private institutions are contributing to Indian research output, and the dynamic changes in their relative positioning with the older institutions, needs a detailed analysis. Such an analysis would not only provide empirical evidence to further explore the factors and impacts of these transitions, but also help understand the changing dynamics of Indian institutional actors w.r.t. research. With the recently initiated systemic and policy changes in Indian Education and R&D ecosystem, these insights may make valuable inputs to direct policy action. Thus, it becomes important to look at the changes in the list of institutions among the top contributors to Indian research. This study attempts to address this gap by identifying the major changes in the composition of the list of the top 100 research output producing institutions during the recent two decades, 2004-13 and 2014-23. The analysis focused on identifying institutions that figure in both lists, those that lose their positions, and the new entrants. More specifically, the study attempts to answer following research questions:

RQ1: Which Indian institutions figure in the list of top 100 research output producers during the last 20-year period (2004-13 and 2014-23)?

RQ2: What are the major changes in the composition of the top 100 list during 2004-13 and 2014-23, and what do these changes indicate?

Related Work

Over the past few years, performance assessment and ranking of Indian institutions has become an area of policy and academic interest at national level. The institutional rankings promoted by the Ministry of Education, Govt. of India, namely, NIRF and Atal Ranking of Institutions on Innovation Achievements (ARIIA) can be seen as two examples (MHRD, 2017). In addition to these efforts, various researchers have also analysed the research performance of an individual or a group of institutions.

The research performance of India and Indian Institutions has been compared to institutions in different countries on criteria of research productivity (Prathap, 2017; Prathap and Sriram, 2017; Prathap, 2018; Singh et al., 2020; Rajan et al., 2018). At national level, several individual studies have been conducted to analyse the performances of institutions or institution systems, such as the All India Institute of Medical Science (AIIMS) (Nishavathi and Jeyshankar, 2018), IITs (Prathap and Gupta, 2009; Prathap, 2014; Banshal et al., 2017), NITs (Bala and Kumari, 2013; Banshal et al., 2018), Indian Institute of Management (IIMs) (Tyagi, 2024; Singh, Nandy and Singh, 2022), Indian Medical Institutions (Ray et al., 2016), IISERs (Solanki, Uddin and Singh, 2016), ICARs (Suresh and Thanuskodi, 2019), Central Universities (Basu et al., 2016; Kanaujia et al., 2022), Private universities (Prathap and Sriram, 2017; Banshal et al., 2019) etc. More recently, a group of researchers developed a portal named ‘Indian Science Reports’ (www.indianscience.net) that benchmarks research output related indices and analysis for 1000 Indian institutions (Singh et al., 2022).

Though there have been several previous studies on analysis of research output and performance of Indian institutions, no previous study tried to see the institutional shifts in the contribution to Indian research output over time. It is not known as to whether and to what extent the composition of the list of the top 100 research output producing institutions have changed during the last 20 years. The study attempts to address this gap by identifying the major changes in the composition of the list of the top 100 research output producing institutions during the recent two decades, 2004-13 and 2014-23. The institutions that gain rank in the list, those that lose and go out of the list, and those that are able to retain their position, are identified. A discussion on the type and nature of the institutions losing and gaining in the list is developed.

Data and Method

The study has obtained research publication data (restricted to document types ‘article’ and ‘review’) of the Indian institutions from the Web of Science (WoS) database. WoS is a reputed and reliable publication database with a standardised and predefined criteria for inclusion of research publications. It enlists data from more than 34,000 journals and is widely used for exploring scientific data. The choice of limiting search to Article and Review articles is to only include high quality publications.

The data collection has happened in two stages. In the first stage the WoS database has been queried with the search queries CU=“India” AND DT=“Article” OR “Review” AND PY=“2004-2013” and CU=“India” AND DT=“Article” OR “Review” AND PY=“2014-2023” to obtain the overall Indian research output for the said periods. The database search resulted in a total of 12,74,094 publication records. The second stage utilized the Analyze Results feature of WoS. This feature allows to delve the research outputs using multiple metadata fields like Affiliations, Web of Science Categories, Research areas etc. The result includes publication count and its percentage share in total output for each unique value of the selected metadata field. For our case specifically Affiliations were used. All the variations in the name of Institutions were consolidated and the variant with the highest publication count was used for further querying. Following this the most common name form of the institution was used for reporting. For instance, in case of Vellore Institute of Technology, variants included "Vellore Institute of Technology VIT" (20,865), "VIT Vellore" (17,269), "VIT AP University" (1,206), and "VIT Bhopal University" (729); the first was used for querying and "VIT Vellore" for reporting. No new entities were introduced. From the results a list of top institutions in terms of research output is identified for both the time periods. Thereafter, the united list for time periods, 2004-2013 and 2014-2023, is also obtained. This list contains a total of 140 unique institutions, appearing in the top 100 during each period.

To analyse the different trends and indicators, programs written in Python were used. The different indicators computed for the given list of institutions include total research publications, proportionate share to Indian research output, and the Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of publications in the two analysis periods.

The changes in these indicators for the different institutions were observed and have been reported in the results section. The institutions which entered and those which slipped out of the top 100 list in the 2014-2023 period were identified and reported. A discussion around the type and nature of these institutions is developed.

RESULTS

Research output of top 100 Indian institutions during the two time periods of 10-year each

For the top 100 institutions in the 2004-2013 period, the total publication count was 2,23,532. Among them, IISc Bangalore had the highest number of publications i.e., 13965 followed by IIT Kharagpur (10561) and University of Delhi (9456). In the 2014-2023 period, the total publication count of the top 100 institutions was 4,60,813 (Table 1). Among them the top three institutions remained in their positions with 21976, 21349 and 21109 publications, respectively. In the top 10 institutions, IIT Kanpur moved from 9^th position to 14^th position, Jadavpur University moved from 10^th to 22^nd position, IIT Roorkee moved from 12^th to 10^th position, and Vellore Institute of Technology moved from 45^th to 8^th position. The total number of publications for the institute at 100th position in 2004-2013 period was 1107 while the same for 2014-2023 period was 3407, which matches with the overall increase in publication output from India. In Table 1, the positions of institutes in both periods are provided and arrows are used to indicate change in the position. Movements within top 100 are shown by single arrows (↑ or ↓), and in or out of top 100 is shown by double arrows (⇈ or ⇊), while dash (-) shows no change in position.

Notably, 40 institutions in the top 100 of 2004-2013 slipped out of the top 100 in the 2014-2023 period (Table 1). The overall CAGR (2004-2023) was highest for Saveetha Institute of Medical Technical Science at 53.29% and it moved from 420^th position with 198 publications during 2004-2013 to 20^th position with 10,777 publications during 2014-2023 in the top 100 institutions. It may also be noted from the table that the proportionate share of research contribution of almost all the institutions have decreased from first to second time period.

In between the two periods a total of 40 institutions moved out of the top 100 list based on their publication output. Among them eighteen (18) are universities (16 state and 2 central), eleven (11) are a part of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), while others are different other institutions (Table 2). This may be related with findings reported in an earlier study, where it was found that CSIR system’s proportionate share in national research output has declined from 2001-2005 to 2016-2020 (Kanaujia et al., 2022).

Now we look at individual institutions which were in the top 100 list in the 1^st period, but went out of the list in the 2^nd time period. The major Universities moving out of top 100 were, University of Mysore which moved from 29^th to 113^th position, University of Rajasthan (35 to 191), University of Allahabad (41 to 104), Sri Venkateswara University (44 to 142), Maharaja Sayajirao University Baroda (47 to 111), Mangalore University (48 to 193), Andhra University (49 to 106), Shivaji University (55 to 120), University of Mumbai (57 to 172), Lucknow University (61 to 123), Madurai Kamaraj University (62 to 129), Kalyani University (65 to 117), Karnataka University (68 to 179), Kurukshetra University (74 to 149), Bangalore University (77 to 218), Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University Hyderabad (78 to 146), Govind Ballabh Pant University of Agriculture Technology (89 to 162), and Dr. Hari Singh Gour University (96 to 256). Thus, many state universities, which were among the top 100 contributors to Indian research output during 2004-13 moved out of this list during 2014-23.

Several CSIR institutions have also lost their position, such as Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI) (33 to 107), Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI) (53 to 176), National Institute Interdisciplinary Science Technology (NIIST) (52 to 139), Central Leather Research Institute (CLRI) (59 to 185), Indian Institute of Chemical Biology (IICB) (70 to 194), National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) (73 to 168), Central Electrochemical Research Institute (CECRI) (76 to 138), Central Salt Marine Chemical Research Institute (CSMCRI) (82 to 156), Centre for Cellular Molecular Biology (CCMB) (86 to 255), National Geophysical Research Institute (NGRI) (88 to 206), Central Glass Ceramic Research Institute (CGCRI) (100 to 220). This is an important trend which warrants further exploration in the output patterns of CSIR institutions. Among the most plausible reasons, this shift may be either due to decrease in research activities, hence publications from these institutions or, due to a change of nature of research outcomes from these institutes (say patents, technology transfers etc., instead of research papers).

Among the other institutions, Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) (34 to 110), Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) India (75 to 134), Inter University Accelerator Centre (79 to 203), UGC DAE Consortium for Scientific Research (81 to 128), SN Bose National Centre for Basic Science (SNBNCBS) (84 to 163), Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (87 to 196), Maulana Azad Medical College (91 to 167), Bose Institute (92 to 161), National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education Research (NIPER) SAS Nagar Mohali (95 to 257), ICAR National Dairy Research Institute (97 to 101), and Institute of Physics Bhubaneswar (IOPB) (99 to 155) moved to positions outside top 100. Taken together, the contribution of these 40 organisations in national output during the 1^st period was 14.7% of publication in the first period, which reduced to 8.01% during the 2^nd period.

Other major organisations whose position in terms of share of publications reduced were CSIR-Indian Institute of Chemical Technology (IICT), Kolkata (13 to 38), CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory (NCL), Pune (19 to 46), Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (IACS), Jadavpur (20 to 60), Annamalai University (21 to 42), University Of Madras (22 to 52), and CSIR-National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Delhi (27 to 87). The highest CAGR over both periods among these institutions is 10.24% for Jawaharlal Nehru Technical University Hyderabad. From Table 1 it may also be noted that many of these institutions had a negative CAGR in the 2^nd period indicating a slower rate of publication during the period. The movement of central and state universities out of the top 100 list raises concerns regarding their research activities and environment. The movement of central government funded R&D institutions (Bose Institute, IOPB, JNCASR, PRL, Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology, SNBNCBS), CSIR, ICAR, NIPER Institutes and UGC centres etc. out of the top 100 institutions list, may however be an indication of either a change in research agenda with higher focus on other activities such as technology development, patents, etc. or a general decline in research activity in these institutions.

New entrants in the 2013-2024 period are mainly Private universities (18), NITs (9), IITs (5), IISERs (2), many of which were newly established (Table 3). Three (3) state universities, Alagappa University (97), Delhi Technical University (55) and University of Kashmir (69) also entered the top-100 institutions. The most notable pattern is in the case of the private universities, where a major change can be observed in the total number of publications, rising from only a few hundred publications to thousands of publications in the period, indicating a major focus on research activities and outputs in these institutions.

The private universities that improved in ranking are, SRM Institute of Science Technology Chennai (119 to 17), Shanmugha Arts Science Technology Research Academy SASTRA (170 to 40), Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology (173 to 83), Siksha O Anusandhan University (222 to 49), Gandhi Institute of Technology Management (GITAM) (223 to 73), Amity University NOIDA (227 to 33), SSN College of Engineering (244 to 94), Sathyabama Institute of Science Technology (282 to 70), Datta Meghe Institute of Higher Education Research Deemed To Be University (288 to 56), Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT) (296 to 45), Lovely Professional University (442 to 35), Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation K L Deemed To Be University (461 to 64), Saveetha Dental College Hospital (788 to 43), GLA University (806 to 88), Symbiosis International University (1092 to 96), and, Chandigarh University which was established in 2012 and is placed at 65th position in the 2014-2023 period. A closer look at the newly entering private universities suggests that many of them are large universities with more than 500 faculty members (QS Top University Profiles-https://www.topuniversities.com/universities/).

Among the NITs, the nine institutes that gained are Malaviya NIT Jaipur (252 to 67), Motilal Nehru NIT in Prayagraj (171 to 98), NIT Calicut (193 to 100), NIT Durgapur (141 to 80), NIT Karnataka (112 to 50), NIT Silchar (480 to 78), NIT Warangal (181 to 57), Sardar Vallabhbhai NIT (173 to 83), and Visvesvaraya NIT Nagpur (243 to 95). Five IITs are four newly established institutes, namely IIT Bhubaneswar (333 to 90), IIT Hyderabad (266 to 37), IIT Indore (397 to 40), IIT Patna (387 to 89), and IIT-ISM Dhanbad (120 to 23), entered the top 100 list in the second period. JIPMER (140 to 82), and two IISERs Pune (213 to 62) and Kolkata (163 to 72), also entered the list. These 40 new entrant institutions taken together account for 17.57% of the total research publications in the 2^nd period.

DISCUSSION

The research publications from Indian Institutions during two periods 2004-2013 and 2014-2023 were analysed and the major contribution institutions during the two periods were identified. The Total Publications (TP), share in national TP and the CAGR of publications of the top 100 institutions were computed and their respective management and funding types were found out and presented. Top 3 institutions remained the same during both periods, namely, IISc, IIT Kharagpur and University of Delhi, indicating their continued emphasis on research activities and possibly the researcher base. In the Top 10 list, 2 institutions in the first period, IIT Kanpur (9) and Jadavpur University (10) moved out in the second period. In the top 100 list of 2004-13, there are eight (8) IITs, eleven (11) central universities, thirty-two (32) state universities, fourteen (14) CSIR labs, seven (7) private universities and 28 others. However, during the 2014-23 period, this list changes to include a total of thirteen (13) IITs, nine (9) central universities, nineteen (19) state universities, three (3) CSIR labs, twenty-four (24) private universities and 32 others. A total of 40 institutions were replaced in the second period by other institutions. Among the institutions which lost their position there were eighteen (18) state universities, and eleven (11) CSIR labs. In the second time period several private universities (18), NITs (9), IITs (5), IISERs (2), state universities (3), and some centrally funded institutions entered the top-100 institutions list. These patterns are a major indicator of an overall decline in research activity and output of state universities. Similarly, a drop in number of CSIR Labs in the top 100 list also needs a detailed exploration as to whether this indicates towards lesser research intensity or perhaps a change in research focus with higher emphasis on technologies and products rather than publications.

It is to be noted that, in 2003, the government introduced regulation for establishment and maintenance of standards in private universities (UGC 2003), and in 2008 the recommendations of National Knowledge Commission (NKC) report “Towards a Knowledge Society: Three Years of the National Knowledge Commission” were released which also made the case for increasing private investment in education. These paved the way for establishment of new large private universities which are multidisciplinary and focus on research in addition to regular education activities (Sengupta, 2020). It is observed that in terms of research publications, several established government-funded institutions have been overtaken by private universities and the newly established Institutions of National Importance (INIs), such as newly formed IITs and IISERs, having express focus on research along with good funding support. The NITs which were formed from the Regional Engineering Centres in the early 2000s have also moved into the list, indicating a clear pattern of increased research intensity in these institutions.

The results also indicate that several state universities and CSIR labs have moved out of the top 100 list during the 2^nd time period. A closer analysis shows that, in most cases, the total number of publications from them did not increase much during the period. The low growth in the number of publications of universities may indicate increasing problems in the research ecosystem in these institutions and possibly also a sign of the research infrastructure becoming outdated. In the case of CSIR, a major systemic change happened with the establishment of Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research (AcSIR), a national university with CSIR labs as its campus hubs and scientists as professors. This injected a large number of new research students in the CSIR system and may have led to changes in productivity profiles of the institutes. However, despite this increase in the number of researchers, the growth of the number of publications from various CSIR labs has been low. The slower growth in number of publications from CSIR labs despite the significant systemic changes is an aspect which demands further exploration. For instance, there may be a change in focus of laboratory research, such as activities other than research publication. These may include, technology development, incubation, technology transfer, patents, educational programmes, strategic international partnerships etc. Alternatively, there may be a change in performance assessment criteria or other administrative requirements affecting the publication output.

When the patterns of growth in number of publications of certain institutions are seen along with the increase in the number of Institutes of National Importance and private universities; one inference may be that the several newly formed institutes have started contributing to the national research output in a short span of time and possibly some more such institutions may enter in this list in the next few years. The several private institutions which have entered the top 100 indicate a significant shift in the outlook and the role of the private sector in education and research in India. A good number of well-known state universities going out of the top 100 list is, however, a very disturbing observation that needs a serious and detailed examination and subsequent corrective actions.

CONCLUSION

This study looked at the research output from Indian universities, and research institutions across two periods 2004-13 and 2014-23 and identified the ones which had the highest number of publications. It looked for changes in the composition of the top 100 list and tried to identify the type of institutions which entered the top 100 list in the 2^nd period and also those institutions which moved out of the top 100 list in the 2^nd period.

The two most notable observations are: (a) the growth in the number of private universities and newly established INIs which have made their entry in the top 100 list, and (b) a decline in the number of state universities from the top 100 research producers list. The new entrant institutions in the top 100 have replaced several state universities, and centrally funded research institutions such as the CSIR laboratories, ICAR and NIPER institutes. Thus, these observations indicate a possible institutional shift in contribution to the research publications of India. The state universities and certain CSIR labs going out of the top 100 list is, however, a disturbing observation that needs to be examined in more detail to concretely identify the probable reasons.

While this work presents a very interesting and useful analysis of institutional shifts in contribution to Indian research output, it may be noted that these findings are based on the research publications data only and does not include patents or technologies developed. Additionally, as the research publication data is drawn from Web of Science, any publication in other journals not listed in the Web of Science database are not accounted for. One may, therefore, like to explore with data drawn from other scholarly databases like Scopus, to see if similar patterns of institutional shifts are observed.