The North East Institute of Science and Technology (NEIST) here has achieved the distinction of being globally ranked 556 among 5250 institutes surveyed by SCImago for 2017.
It is possibly the first on the list among research institutes in the Northeast. D Ramaiah, director of the Institute, said two years ago it was not even on the list.
“We made it into the list for the first time in 2016 and were ranked 638. This time we have almost gone 100 ranks ahead,” he said.
According to the SCImago website, ‘SCImago is a research group from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), University of Granada, Extremadura, Carlos III (Madrid) and Alcalá de Henares, dedicated to information analysis, representation and retrieval by means of visualisation techniques.
The SCImago institutions ranking (SIR) is a classification of academic and research-related institutions ranked by a composite indicator that combines three different sets of indicators based on research performance, innovation outputs and societal impact measured by their web visibility.
Unlike the Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), Quacqurelli Symonds (QS) rankings, Times Higher Education (THE) which focuses on higher education, SCImago focuses on research and its social impact apart from other parameters and includes research institutes both in the government and private sectors as well as institutes of higher education in both the sectors.
In the article, Indian Research Institutions in the government sector, published in Current Science, Vol. 114 No 1, 10 January 2018 among the 29 out of 38 institutes which are under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and have made it into the global ranking, NEIST is in the 15th rank.
Ramaiah said that among the CSIR institutes, NEIST has made jumped from 20th rank to 11th.
The Current Science article further said in 2017 not a single private research institute in India made it into the list while 60 from the government sector besides the CSIR institutes included those under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), Defence Research and Development Organization (DRDO) and Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO).
Ramaiah said the achievement was a team effort and each division was to be praised for bringing this laurel to the institute. He hoped they would make a quantum leap in 2018.
