Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings

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Why in News?

Three years after the IITs boycotted the THE World University Rankings over issues of “transparency”, the ranking agency made specific changes in the performance parameters this year to address their concerns.
The Times Higher Education World University Rankings/THE Rankings are annually published by the UK-based Times Higher Education magazine.

The seven old IITs (Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur, Roorkee, Kharagpur and Guwahati) had boycotted THE Rankings first in 2020, citing concerns over transparency.
None of them found a place among the world’s best 300 universities in 2019, when a relatively newer IIT (Indore) surprisingly beat its older and established counterparts by scoring high on the citation metric.
The citation metric measures the average number of times a university’s published work is cited by scholars globally, carrying a weightage of 30% earlier.
- One of the reasons the IITs had raised concerns over the citation metric was the issue of collaborative research projects.
- The IITs had alleged that participating institutions use collaborative research projects to bump up their score on the citation metric.
- An institution that is part of such a project ends up having a disproportionate advantage over others because such projects get high citations due to multiple authors.

The weightage of citation metric has now been reduced by half, down to 15%.
Apart from this, THE has added three new indicators that collectively account for 15% – typical research strength (5%), excellence in research (5%) and the network effect of citations (5%) – collectively making up for the reduction in the citation metric.
- While ‘typical research strength’ gauges how strong a university’s research is compared to others, ‘excellence in research’ is a measure that looks at whether a university has areas of outstanding research.
- The ‘network effect of citations’ considers that a citation from a more important researcher carries more weight than a citation from a less important researcher.
THE argued that the above changes would address IITs’ concern over high-ranking positions for very small, relatively unknown Indian Institutions, with high volatility of positions.
However, none of the 7 IITs have yet decided to resume their participation in THE Rankings.

It includes 1,799 universities across 104 countries and regions, making them the largest and most diverse university rankings to date.
It is based on 13 carefully calibrated performance indicators that measure an institution’s performance across four areas: teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.