The latest ranking issued by the Scientometrics Lab of Information Technology University (ITU) show that no Pakistani university has made it to the top 30 institutes of the Muslim world in quality research.

ITU Quality Research Rankings (ITU-QRR) provide analytics of more than 450 universities and institutes of the Muslim World to benchmark research performance across 250 plus subject areas for the purpose of strengthening the quality and impact of research.

King Abdulaziz University, Saudi Arabia, topped the list with a score of 10.82, followed by University of Malaya, Malaysia, with a score of 10.31. The score is calculated on the basis of the highest quality of publication. Most of the top 20 varsities are from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and Malaysia.

Pakistan’s Quaid-e-Azam University (QAU) is 35 on the list with a score of 3.21, followed by COMSATS Institute of Information Technology with 2.83 score, University of Agriculture, Faisalabad with 1.89 score and National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) with 1.44.

The rankings are divided into two categories. The broad institutes that are research active in more than eight disciplines while specialized institutions are research active between three to eight disciplines. Two of Pakistani universities are among top 20 of Muslim countries in the category of specialized institutions. Agha Khan University is in 6th place and Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology is in 13th place with 3.48 and 2.46 score, respectively.

Saeed-ul-Hassan, director at the ITU’s Scientometrics Lab, said, “The publications in top five percentile of normalized impact factor of journals and conferences in across subject categories are taken as highest quality publications. In addition, the ranked outlets, A* and A, from ERA CORE 2014 is also used to assess publication quality. Subject areas are organized into a hierarchy with 16 broad level and 250 plus detail level categories,”

None of the universities from the Muslim world are even near institutions of the non-Muslim countries in terms of quality research. ITU-QRR uses Harvard University as a benchmark with a score of 100. The top university from Muslim world got a score of 10.82 as compared to the 100 of Harvard University.

Umar Saif concluded by saying, “This ranking presents a data-driven, independent and quantified yardstick on where our universities stand in terms of research output. Ranking of Pakistani universities should be a wake-up call for us.”

Source: The News

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