Careers 360 English Edition – July 2019

Medical Education Special INTRODUCTION

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T

he increase in number of seats for MBBS programme
by over 35 percent in the last 5 years and opening of
new institutions like AIIMS is indicative of the concern
shown by different stakeholders, including the policymak-
ers, towards medical education in the country. Though this
growth is not proportionate to the need for medical profes-
sionals, the efforts in the direction are likely to show some
positive outcomes in the domain.

Assessment of institutions
Out of the universe of around 500 Indian institutes that offer
over 65,000 seats in MBBS programme, the first stage of
shortlisting of 222 institutes was done on the basis of cut-offs
in the state and national-level entrance tests as well as publi-
cation count in the last three years (2016-2018). Analysis of
data set was carried out to assess rank/score in entrance tests
and cut-offs. This was further corrected using normalization.
The next level of analysis was carried out by applying a
set of scientometric techniques looking at PubMed and
Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science (WoS) for searching
publication records. The WoS covers scholarly articles from
over 33,000 referred journals and is considered one of the
most trusted sources of citation analysis. PubMed – a reputed
academic-research database at the National Institute of
Health, USA was used to make the evaluation process more
robust. PubMed includes Medline records and has over
25 million bibliographic information of scholarly literature
covering almost all the fields of life sciences, including health,
biomedicine and chemical sciences.
The data on number of core faculty, key departments,
intake et al were taken from the database of Medical Council
of India and Pharmacy Council of India as well as the official
websites of institutes. Data submitted by institutes and infor-
mation garnered from authentic sources like Annual Reports,
NIRF website and RTI et al were also considered.

Publication and citation
For ranking purpose, the publication records of institutes were
searched using an inbuilt ‘affiliation search’ box. For institutes
or universities which have departments other than medicine,
their publication records were restricted to publications from
medicine departments only. The search, which was limited to
three-year period (2016-18), retrieved a set of results such as
publication count, number of citations received, citation per
paper and h-index. The records from PubMed database were
also searched in a similar fashion for 2015-17.

Patents
Patenting in the field of medicine is generally costly and
time consuming. The records at Indian Patent Office were
searched (Controller General of Patents Design and Trade-
mark website) and information was collated on granted

patents and filed intellectual Property (IP) by searching the

institute’s name as it appears in any of the following fields:

Name of Grantee, Applicant and Inventors address. As com-

pared to Medical institutes, data and information for Phar-

macy institutes on intellectual property ( both granted and

filed as well as IP earnings) was found to be more organized

and uniform on the NIRF official platform which is officially

submitted by medical institutes. Thus, for Pharmacy institu-

tions, IP impact was also used as an evaluation parameter.

Employing a threshold criterion, we chose to rank India’s

100 outstanding medical schools – 70 in public and 30 in

private sector separately. Four key parameters were identi-

fied, as seen in the given figure with their weighted scores.

Normalization was carried out for uniformity and scores

were arrived at using max-min formula for some parameters.

Similar process was carried out for assessing the phar-

macy institutes and 25 public and 25 private institutes have

been ranked.

Scientometric inputs: Dr. Swapan Kumar Patra (Post-Doctoral Fel-

low, Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria, SA); Research &

Analysis: Aeshwarya Tiwari, Abinash Somani, V. Avinash Gaud and

Sonakshi Singh

Data Support: Deepesh K Gupta, Prabir K Mohanty, Govind Kumar

and Amit Prasad

Methodology

ASSESSMENT PARAMETERS FOR INDIAN

MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS (2019)

Student Quality

(Cut-off score and

normalized rank in

entrance tests)

Learning & Engagement

(Faculty Quality; Student-

Faculty Ratio)

Research Output

(Publication count in

Pubmed & WoS

Impact (Research

Productivity)

40%

20%

25%

15%

The rating process

A cumulative rating was assigned to all the institutes that

occupy the same output pool based on the above ranking

criteria. We used the natural

gaps that exist in any normal

distribution to identify and

delineate clusters. The robust-

ness of data has enabled us to

discriminate the institutes in

the following categories: