In international rankings, we all know that Pakistani universities don’t even come close to the top 500 mark. How about among the Muslim world?
It turns out that Pakistani universities don’t stand a chance even among universities from other Muslim countries. according to a new report. The rankings, issued by the Scientometrics Lab of Information Technology University (ITU), shows that not a single Pakistani university has made it to the top 30 universities of the Muslim world.
More than 450 universities of the Muslim world were ranked in order to benchmark the research performance of these institutes across more than 250 subject areas. This included universities that were engaged in research for the purpose of strengthening the quality and impact of the same.
Coming towards the ranking, Harvard University in the United States was set as a benchmark with a score of 100. Based on this benchmark, coming in at first place with a score of 10.82, on the basis of score, was the King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. At the second place is the University of Malaya in Malaysia that has score of 10.31. And finally at third place is the University of Tehran, Iran, with a score of 9.98.
The only countries that you would find in the top 20 of ranking list are Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Malaysia and Egypt. Both Iran and Turkey have 7 universities each in the top 20, Saudi Arabia has 3, with 2 Malaysian universities and 1 from Egypt.
The first Pakistani university that comes up on the list is at the 35th position, the Quaid-e-Azam University with a score of 3.21. COMSATS Institute of Information Technology came in at 41 with a score of 2.83. Coming in at 68th position is the University of Agriculture, Faisalabad with a score of 1.89.
It should be noted here that the score of all these universities are out of 100 and even the university that is ranked first on this list, does not even come close to the universities of the non-Muslim world on the basis of any factor, be it quality, research etc. To put things into perspective, if you assume that the word’s top university has a score of 100, then the King Abdulaziz University, which is ranked 1st among the Muslim world, shows a score of just 10.82.
According to the ITU Quality Reseach Ranking, there are two types of universities – Broad and Specialized. Broad universities consist of universities that are research active in more than 8 disciplines and fields, whereas specialized universities consist of universities that are only active between 3-8 disciplines.
The above universities come in the category of broad universities. As far as the ranking for specialized universities is concerned, Pakistan grabs the 6th position with The Aga Khan University, showing a score of 3.48.
The Vice Chancellor for the Information Technology University, Dr Umar Saif said that it was unfortunate that the research output of universities could be manipulated so easily by publishing semi-legit journals, self-organized conferences and plagiarized results.
‘We need to stop this and focus on high quality research. A lot of people are doing good quality research in Pakistan so there’s nothing wrong in the enabling environment. 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 .’
You can also check out the detailed report over here.
