Higher education, high-impact research, and world university rankings: A case of India and comparison with China

Abstract

To date, this paper is probably the first to compare Indian and Chinese universities on educational performance metrics such as high-impact research and world university rankings. The study, therefore, examines the current state of higher education, high-impact research metrics, and world university rankings in an emerging market of India. First, we present an overview of the higher education system, government schemes for academic research, and related educational statistics. Second, we compare India and China on various academic-research metrics (citable documents, number of citations, cites per document, and H-index in three categories), and world university rankings. Special attention is devoted to revealing the progress of management research metrics, business school accreditations and rankings, and abstracting and indexing of publishing journals. Last, we discuss several challenges in university education and recommend policy guidelines pertaining to research funding, collaborative research projects, and research assessment council for imparting quality academic practices and standards in a higher education environment. Our exploratory analysis indicates that for citable documents in the ‘all subjects’ category, the United States is ranked first, followed by China in second, the United Kingdom in third, and India in ninth. Overall, world university rankings and research metrics of Indian universities are found to be far behind those of Chinese universities.