India

National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF)

Purpose

The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), introduced in 2016 by the Ministry of Education, of the Indian government, is an indicator-based system designed to rank public and private colleges and universities across the country.

Participation in NIRF is voluntary and its primary goal is to provide insights into the strengths and weaknesses of Indian universities by evaluating their performance across a panel of indicators. The framework includes Scopus and Web of Science-indexed papers in its assessment but excludes books. One of its key indicators, research and professional practice, evaluates research quality solely based on quantitative indicators such as publications, citations, and patents. Overall, the NIRF framework relies heavily on quantitative indicators, including external project revenue and input metrics such as student numbers and staff gender composition.

The NIRF ranking initially began with a purpose of reputational benchmarking and has become indirectly consequential for other funding decisions affecting individuals, departments, and institutions. These rankings influence the promotion and career progression of individual researchers and are widely used by students to guide their choice of educational institutions. Furthermore, the Promotion of University Research and Scientific Excellence (PURSE) program, launched by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) to enhance research capacity and R&D infrastructure in Indian universities, considers NIRF rankings when selecting institutions for support. Similarly, the PAIR program of the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) prioritizes institutions ranked in the top 25 and top 50 in the NIRF rankings.

Year of Introduction
2016

Census period
Annually

Governance agency(s)
Ministry of Education, Government of India

Purpose
Accountability
Statistics and Overview of Research Activity

Unit of Assessment
The organisation as a whole

Focus of Assessment
Scholarly outputs
Scientific Impact
Organisational performance

Governance

The NIRF is directly overseen by the government through the Ministry of Education. Participation in the exercise is voluntary.

Operation of the exercise

The research assessment in the NIRF framework is based on the evaluation of scholarly outputs, scientific impacts, and organisational performance.

The NIRF follows a voluntary participation model, with the institution as a whole being the primary unit of assessment. Additionally, the framework provides rankings based on disciplines and the type of higher education institutions, such as public universities, research institutions, colleges, etc. However, the overall institutional ranking holds the greatest significance.

The research assessment in the NIRF is based on bibliometric indicators and falls under the Research and Professional Practice (RP) category. RP is a composite indicator that includes the following sub-indicators:

Combined Metric for Publications (PU)
Combined Metric for Quality of Publications (QP)
Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and Patents (including Patents Filed, Published, Granted, and Licensed)
Footprint of Projects, Professional Practice, and Executive Development Programs (FPPP)

The publication metric includes only research articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science.

The overall RP assessment metric is calculated as follows:
RP = PU(35) + QP(35) + IPR(15) + FPPP(15)

For the detailed 2023 methodology, please refer to the official document.