Scientifically Speaking: Indian varsities fare poorly on global ranking — What it means

GLobal university rankings feature suit a procedure component part of how donnish power is discussed and compared. Each new table is scanned for winners, losers, and signs of national ascent or decline. The latest flashpoint is the Leiden Ranking, produced by researchers at Leiden University in the Netherlands, which focuses narrowly on scientific publications and citations. That narrow metric did not stop broader conclusions from being drawn. The New York Times framed the results as American slippage and Chinese ascent. Harvard fell to third place. Chinese universities dominated the top tier. Rafael Reif, former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, warned that papers from China were “dwarfing what we’re doing in the US”.The concentration of Chinese universities near the top of the table did not surprise me. This is the direction of travel I have been observing over the past two decades. China’s research capacity has expanded steadily and deliberately, in ways visible to anyone who follows global science. Scale matters, as do funding continuity and publication incentives.What did catch my attention and was entirely unexpected is what I saw when I searched for Indian universities. The highest-ranked Indian institution in the Leiden table appears in the 270s. It is Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT). Behind it come several IITs, and then the Indian Institute of Science (IISc).I paused. One would expect that one of our storied IITs or IISc would break into the top 200 research institutions globally.India is described as a rising scientific power by output. Publication counts have increased sharply over the past decade. If a ranking is built on papers and citations, why do Indian institutions sit so far down the list?This raises a basic question: what, exactly, is being measured here?The answer, at least in part, lies in the nature of the Leiden Ranking, which is clear about scope and methodology. It does not attempt to measure intangible university quality. It does not incorporate reputation surveys, employer perceptions, teaching quality, student outcomes, or societal impact. What it does count is publications and citations drawn from Web of Science, a widely used bibliometric database. That focus is by design as a window into a particular slice of global research visibility.Publications are the currency of academic research. Web of Science captures internationally oriented, largely English-language journals well, and it does better in some disciplines than others. Institutions embedded in dense international collaboration networks tend to accumulate citations more readily than those that are not, even when the underlying work is comparable. Citations reflect quality, but they also reflect connectivity, scale, and position within global scientific traffic.Leiden offers multiple indicators, some size-dependent and others normalized for size in its rankings. Depending on which are emphasized, different institutions rise or fall, though the general trend remains the same. For example, if you look at the share of papers in the top decile by citations, Harvard climbs to first place. Stanford appears at eighth. The next non-Chinese university, Toronto, sits at tenth. Oxford does not appear until fifteenth. Thirteen of the top twenty by this measure are Chinese. In short, China’s strength does not vanish whether you focus on volume or on highly cited work.India’s picture is less straightforward. In reputation-weighted rankings like QS World University Rankings, Indian institutions look stronger. More than 50 Indian universities appear in the latest QS table. IIT Delhi sits at 123, its highest position yet, with IIT Bombay close behind. The IIT brand carries global recognition, built over decades through alumni success and visibility.In Leiden’s bibliometric view, reputation does not directly matter.The VIT ranking, in particular, invites questions. Is its disciplinary mix more aligned with high-output fields? Does it collaborate more extensively in networks that drive citations? Has it, consciously or not, optimized for precisely the kinds of outputs that bibliometric systems reward? All of these are plausible explanations and reflect areas where VIT appears to have executed well in a relatively short time.The Indian Institute of Science’s relatively low placement raises different questions. IISc is widely regarded as a venerable research-intensive institution with high standards. If it appears lower than expected in a bibliometric ranking, does that reflect field mix, scale, collaboration patterns, or publication choices? Does it publish more in venues that matter deeply within certain communities but travel less easily through citation networks? Or is something else going on?Claims about university quality based on rankings deserve caution, and confidence should come only after looking closely at the underlying data. To their credit, the creators of the Leiden Ranking themselves warn against over-interpreting rank positions. They argue that there is no single, generic concept of university performance. Different users care about different dimensions of activity. Small differences in indicators can translate into large jumps in rank, creating an illusion of distance where little exists. What does it actually mean to be the 200th ranked university in the world compared to the 300th?It is well-known that every university highlights the rankings that flatter it and dismisses the ones that do not. But every ranking should come with its own warning label. Caveat emptor. Rankings only measure what they are designed to measure.Anirban Mahapatra is a scientist and author, most recently of When the Drugs Don’t Work. The views expressed are personal.