Starry skies over the IITs GANGAN PRATHAP What better way to assess the research performance of the IITs than to go star gazing? The Stanford Lists (Ioannidis et al. 2020, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000918) along with their open access databases (at (https://dx.doi.org/10.17632/btchxktzyw) allow us to do precisely that. The latest is the third of such lists which the team led by a Stanford academician has appeared regularly since 2016. The 2020 version gives us two separate lists, using citation data from Scopus frozen as of May 6, 2020. The Single Year list gives the citation impact, i.e. the number of times a published article has been cited by articles published during the single calendar year 2019 for more than 160,000 scientists from a ranking list of more than 6 million scientists globally. The Career list assesses scientists for career-long citation impact, from articles published from 1996 until the end of 2019 for nearly 160,000 scientists from a ranking list of nearly 3 million scientists. Note that many names will be common to both lists, meaning that their career long work continues to be prominently cited in the most recent year. Some will be found in one list but not the other. Taken together, this means that the Single Year and Career lists allow us to separate the stars into three distinct groups. The “rising” stars are those found in the Single Year list but are missing in the Career list. These are largely from those who are in the early stages of their careers. The “setting” stars are those in the Career list but absent from the Single Year list. Their work is fading away from the immediate scientific imagination. Many names remain common to both lists, and it is to this cohort that we shall assign the “steady” appellation. Let us do a bit of data mining to see the stars in the research firmament over the 18 IITs that figure in the Stanford lists. Altogether there are 514 unique individuals that appear in both lists together, with 445 in the Single Year list and 294 in the Career List. Of the 514, 220 are rising stars, 225 are steady stars and 69 are fading stars. This is an encouraging sign in that the IIT system is recognising and inducting a large number of promising young scientists. 1 Tables 1 and 2 and Figure 1 sum up the research skyscape over the top seven older IITs and the remaining newer 16. These are arguably the top scientists in the IIT system, being counted among the top 2% of all scientists in the world taken field and subfield-wise. From only this standpoint, IIT Delhi, is the best research-intensive institution in this list. However, IIT Guwahati, the youngest and smallest in this group, is also the one that has proportionately the largest number of rising stars. The same is true of the new IITs. The five newest IITs that are yet to figure has important lessons to learn from such lists as they go about choosing new faculty. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Gangan Prathap is an aeronautical engineer and former scientist at the National Aeronautical Laboratory, Bangalore and former VC of Cochin University of Science and Technology. He is currently a professor at the A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Technological University, Thiruvananthapuram. 2 Table 1: The research skyscape over the top seven IITs. IITs Delhi Kharagpur Bombay Madras Kanpur Roorkee Guwahati TOTAL for Top 7 TOTAL for Rest 16 Rising Steady Setting Stars Stars Stars 32 49 15 32 35 8 20 30 11 20 26 8 20 26 6 20 18 6 16 6 2 Total Stars 96 75 61 54 52 44 24 160 190 56 406 60 35 13 108 Table 2: The research skyscape over the remaining sixteen new IITs. IITs - the Rest BHU Varanasi ISM Dhanbad Indore Hyderabad Ropar Mandi Patna Bhubaneswar Jodhpur Gandhinagar Goa Dharwad Palakkad Jammu Tirupati Bhilai TOTAL for Rest 16 Rising Steady Setting Stars Stars Stars 9 12 2 10 5 2 11 2 2 8 3 2 7 3 0 6 0 4 3 2 0 2 2 1 2 3 0 2 2 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 60 35 3 13 Total Stars 23 17 15 13 10 10 5 5 5 4 1 0 0 0 0 0 108 Figure 1. Pie charts showing the dispersion of star performers in the 7 older IITs and the remaining 16 newer IITs taken together. The five youngest IITs are yet to appear in these lists. 4