NIRF Ranking and Research Trend: A Comparative Study of Research Outcomes of the Ranked Universities of West Bengal

Abstract

The assessment of the quality of higher educational institutes (HEIs) has seen extensive study in the last two decades. The Government of India instituted the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) to judge the quality of these HEIs according to the prescribed methodology. This study primarily explores the general universities of West Bengal included under Section 12- B of the UGC Act against the backdrop of the NIRF 2022 rankings. Data is collected from the NIRF website as well as the SCOPUS bibliographic database. A comparative study is conducted on the research outcomes of the universities to identify the universities with the best performance
across research metrics such as publication count, citation count, funding agencies, subject matter distribution, and document type distribution. The study thus analyses the impact of research outcomes on the rank obtained. Out of the 16 universities concerned, only 11 had research output indexed at SCOPUS, out of which seven were ranked. It can be seen that the clear difference in research output between the universities reflect in their NIRF rankings as well. This study assists the universities of West Bengal in identifying the  mpact of their research output on the academic ranking, which has not been previously explored in this context.