The Performance of Research-Intensive Higher Educational Institutions in India

The institutions belonging to the higher education sector taken together are the biggest contributor to India's academic research output. In this article we use the datasets from the 2013 release of SCImago Institutions Rankings World Reports to evaluate the longitudinal performance of the quality and quantity of research output of select institutions belonging to this sector for the period 2003-2011. All institutions in this elite category have a reasonable to high growth rate in output. However, from the quality angle, we see that the high performers which are mainly the institutions of national importance are now at a relatively low growth level. We also identify a few institutions which are showing promisingly high rates of improvement in quality of research.