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The article discusses the use of litmus test in the evaluation of research performance in universities in India. It cites the Science Citation Index (SCI), an international criterion that determines the quality of research papers before the journals can be placed under a high profile. It notes that the litmus test for achieving top rank by any university is the overall qualitative performance, which has a high impact factor.

An attempt to analyse the pattern of organic chemistry papers in national and international journals was made in this article. We have reviewed the papers published in various subject areas and presented our findings. There is a growing interest in publishing papers in heterocyclic compared to other areas. There is a need for publishing more review papers in fundamental areas in the frontier research segment particularly to benefit the university teachers. We also have analysed the trend of the researchers and their papers. It was found that there is more enthusiasm to publish papers in higher ranking international journals than the premier journals like IJC(B). The neglect of national journals would hurt the research in the country. Effective uses of new synthetic methodologies involving metal catalysed reactions are found in international publications. However, development of new methodologies, new reagents and serious structure-activity relationship in medicinal chemistry were not visible in the research papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author discusses a rational procedure to rank the research performance of universities in India, through identification of correlated indicators. It cites an approach for ranking of research performance based on quantum of output as well as quality from different Indian universities with a procedure that uses a composite indicator combining quality and quantity. The author says that there is a reasonably high correlation between the quality and quantity of a research paper.

We propose a framework score to see how Indian universities and research-focused institutions fare in the world of high-end research in terms of excellence and diversity of their research base. For this we use a web application available in the public domain which visualizes scientific excellence worldwide in several subject areas. Only in 15 subject areas does India have a presence among global institutions in the 22 areas in which there are at least 50 institutes globally that have published more than 500 papers. The country has no institution which can be counted globally in seven areas: arts and humanities; business, management and accounting; health professions; neuroscience; nursing; psychology, and social sciences. India's research base is completely skewed towards the physical sciences and engineering with very little for biological sciences and medicine, and virtually none in social sciences, and arts and humanities when excellence at the highest level is considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the findings of a several report on the rankings of higher education institutions (HEI) including one released by the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at the Leiden University in Leiden, Netherlands. Topics discussed include increase in the number of HEI appearing from India, excellence rates, which determines the percentage of cited research paper and ranking of India-based Punjab University. Also mentioned is the low performance of Indian research institutes.

We have carried out a three-part study comparing the research performance of Indian institutions with that of other international institutions. In the first part, the publication profiles of various Indian institutions were examined and ranked based on the h-index and p-index. We found that the institutions of national importance contributed the highest in terms of publications and citations per institution. In the second part of the study, we looked at the publication profiles of various Indian institutions in the high-impact journals and compared these profiles against that of the top Asian and US universities. We found that the number of papers in these journals from India was miniscule compared to the US universities. Recognizing that the publication profiles of various institutions depend on the field/departments, we studied the publication profiles of many science and engineering departments at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, the Indian Institutes of Technology, as well as top Indian universities. Because the number of faculty in each department varies widely, we have computed the publications and citations per faculty per year for each department. We have also compared this with other departments in various Asian and US universities. We found that the top Indian institution based on various parameters in various disciplines was IISc, but overall even the top Indian institutions do not compare favourably with the top US or Asian universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the University Grants Commission, India has provided a structure of the model curriculum for B Sc (Honours) programme in Microbiology. It is based on the choice-based credit system pattern aiming to improve the academic standards and quality of microbiology education in the country. The structure of the programme has been divided into core courses, discipline-centric elective courses, generic electives, ability enhancement compulsory courses and skill enhancement elective courses. Most of the basic papers related to microbiology are well covered under the core courses and care has been taken to include the recently published books as references. However, certain terms that could bring confusion among the teachers and students have been included, and some topics that are important to microbiology are missing. The subject contents offered under the generic electives seem to be mere repetition of the core courses. Here, I provide a few suggestions to improve the standards of the above-mentioned programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information about several papers discussed at a colloquium organized at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), India on the need to strengthen the Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) training programme in Indian universities is presented. Topics include the recent discoveries of neutrino masses and mixing, properties of intense lasers and precursor effect in magnetic and superconducting transitions. The colloquium was chaired by R. V. Gurjar of TIFR, Mumbai in India.