According to the most recent rankings reports that were made public a month ago, the finding isn’t surprising because the majority of MBA institutes in the country concentrate on teaching.
Over half of the MBA institutes that took part in this year’s NIRF Rankings do not have a single published paper to their name, which is indicative of a poor research culture in the management education ecosystem in the country as a whole.
Nearly 670 different institutes took part in the management category of the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) this year; however, 383 of those institutes, or 57.16 per cent, did not have any research publications. It should come as no surprise that the top 100 management institutes account for 85 per cent of the total number of research papers (4,405) published by the 670 MBA institutes that are participating in NIRF.
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Only 6.5 papers are published in the management category on average across all institutes in three years. This equates to an annual publication rate of just two papers on average. This falls into the category with the lowest score. In comparison, the number of papers published by each institution in the field of engineering is, on average, 168. It is estimated that approximately 6% of the 1,181 participating engineering colleges and institutes do not have any research papers.
As a result, India only accounts for 4.45 per cent of all of the publications in the world that are related to the management discipline. In comparison, our contribution to the global research done in the field of engineering is 6.93 per cent.
The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) uses research output as one of five criteria to evaluate higher education institutions in the management category. The teaching and learning resources, graduation outcomes, outreach and inclusivity, and perception are the other parameters.
According to the NIRF report, the fact that so many institutes have not produced any research publications is “not surprising,” given that the primary mission of many colleges is to educate undergraduate students. According to the findings of the report, management institutions are putting less emphasis on research publications and more of a focus on “case studies.”
On the other hand, the report includes a footnote that states, “As an additional caution, it may be noted that this data pertains to publications that belong to the management discipline as categorised by the Web of Science.” It is obvious that a good number of the top management schools also publish in related fields such as economics, social sciences, information technology, and psychology. However, these fields are not considered to be part of the mainstream management discipline, and therefore they are not taken into consideration here.
This is the seventh edition in a row of the India Rankings, which ranks higher education institutes based on 11 different criteria. The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) report is published by the Department of Higher Education, which is part of the Ministry of Education. This report makes the claim that it uses “objective parameters and metrics with factual data gathered from applicant institutions themselves as well as third party sources.”
