Galgotias’s was asked to withdraw from the India AI Impact Summit after it displayed a Chinese robotic dog as its product

Published on: Oct 2, 2026, 08:31:00 IST

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Private universities, including Galgotias University and Amity University, have scored higher than the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), one of India’s foremost research institutions, on the “research quality” parameter of the latest Times Higher Education (THE) World University Rankings released on Wednesday, raising questions over the soundness of the ranking methodology.

IISc, which emerged as India’s highest-ranked institution in the 2027 rankings with a global rank of 254, was placed 64th among 143 Indian institutions on research quality, with a score of 51.5. Galgotias University in Greater Noida scored 67 and ranked 23rd. Amity University, Noida, scored 76.9 and ranked 12th. Saveetha University topped the Indian list on the indicator with a score of 95.1, followed by Graphic Era at 93.6 and Chitkara at 87.1.

Research quality accounts for 30% of the overall ranking, making it the most heavily weighted of THE’s five performance pillars. The 23rd edition of the UK-based ranking covers 2,297 universities across 118 countries and territories. Institutions are assessed on 17 performance indicators across five broad areas: teaching, research environment, research quality, international outlook and industry impact.

India’s research community has criticised the results, particularly over the extent to which citation-based metrics reflect the quality and integrity of research. “The Research Quality parameter of THE rankings has been called out for the absurd results since 2024. After defending their methodology for the last two years, they have finally announced some minor changes to the methodology from next year,” said Achal Agrawal, founder of India Research Watch, which regularly flags research misconduct in India.

“However, they have still not acted upon penalising institutes with clear misconduct as evidenced by retractions. Many of the institutes doing well in research quality also have some of the highest numbers of retractions in the world.”

Galgotias’s position on the research-quality indicator has drawn attention amid questions over its research credentials. In February 2026, the university was asked to withdraw from the India AI Impact Summit at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi after it was found displaying a commercially available, Chinese-manufactured robotic dog as a product developed at its own centre of excellence. The university apologised for the episode, attributing it to a staff member who was unaware of the product’s origins.

The incident brought renewed attention to the university’s patent record. Since its founding in 2011, Galgotias has filed 2,297 patent applications until 2024-25, exceeding the corresponding figures for IIT Bombay (1,646), IIT Madras (1,782) and IIT Kanpur (939). Only 24 of Galgotias’s applications were granted patents, a success rate of approximately 1%. In 2022-23 alone, the university filed 1,089 applications, more than the combined number by all IITs that year.

THE’s research-quality pillar comprises four indicators: citation impact (15%) and research strength, research excellence and research influence, each carrying 5%. The citation-impact indicator measures the average number of times an institution’s published research is cited by scholars globally, with the data normalised to account for differences in citation patterns across disciplines.

For the 2027 rankings, THE said its bibliometric data supplier Elsevier provided 188.7 million citations to 19.9 million publications, including journal articles, reviews, conference proceedings, books and book chapters published between 2021 and 2025. Citations to those publications made between 2021 and 2026 were also collected. The data covered more than 29,100 active peer-reviewed journals indexed in Elsevier’s Scopus database.

THE did not respond to ’s queries.

THE has acknowledged vulnerabilities in the methodology and announced changes planned for the 2028 edition, scheduled for publication in autumn 2027. In a statement on September 30, Phil Baty, THE’s global affairs officer, said the revisions would include a cap on institutional self-citations and changes to the research-quality metrics to reduce the influence of citation impact.

“With so much riding on the results of the rankings, it is right that universities scrutinise the criteria, methodologies and underlying data that produce their scores and their public ranking position,” Baty said, adding that THE encouraged such scrutiny through an “open, collaborative approach” and tools to help universities benchmark themselves against peers.

Acknowledging that the pursuit of rankings could sometimes distort institutional priorities, he said: “It is natural that success in rankings becomes part of a university’s strategic ambition. But sometimes that ambition can go too far.”

“Sadly, there are cases in which a university’s focus on ranking positions becomes problematic: distorting missions to make the metrics not a means to an end, but rather an end in themselves; and, more rarely, leading to gaming and the manipulation of data to gain an unfair advantage in the league table,” Baty said.

Under the proposed changes, THE plans to limit institutional self-citations in its bibliometric analysis from the 2028 edition. Baty said self-citations could be legitimate, reflecting incremental or groundbreaking research, but could also be abused through citation networks, sometimes called citation cartels or clubs, and coercive citation practices in which researchers are obliged to cite others’ work illegitimately.

THE plans to recalibrate its research-quality metrics by reducing the weight of citation impact and increasing the weight of research strength, research excellence and research influence. Baty said the citation-impact measure, despite being widely used by THE for more than a decade, could be skewed by statistical outliers at institutions with lower publication volumes and was vulnerable to active manipulation.

“When evaluating research quality, a basket of diverse metrics is the optimal approach,” he said, explaining that the changes were intended to provide a more balanced assessment. THE plans to publish further details of the proposed thresholds and calculation adjustments in the coming months, with the changes to be opened to public scrutiny and debate before they are finalised next year.

The concerns over the methodology are not new among leading Indian institutions. Seven IITs — Bombay, Delhi, Guwahati, Kanpur, Kharagpur, Madras and Roorkee — opted out of THE’s World University Rankings in 2020, raising concerns over transparency and the ranking parameters.

In January 2026, BITS Pilani withdrew, citing concerns over transparency, methodological rigour and the need for verifiable benchmarking in higher education evaluation. The institute said it remained open to re-engaging with THE if the ranking framework evolved towards greater transparency, consistency and verifiability.

THE’s World University Rankings assess institutions across teaching, research environment, research quality, international outlook and industry. The research environment pillar accounts for 29% of the overall score, while teaching accounts for 29.5%. The remaining weight is assigned to international outlook and industry.

Baty said the methodological revisions for 2028 reflected THE’s commitment to maintaining trust in its rankings and ensuring that the data and analyses appropriately recognise the high stakes attached to rankings worldwide.

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