The group of five IISERs has been ranked fourth in India in a list of top scientific institutions published by the prestigious Nature Index¹. They have also made it to the top fifty institutes in the Asia Pacific region². The nine-year-old IISERs are next only to the veterans of Indian science such as the IITs, the CSIR laboratories, and the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

The Nature Index report takes stock of science in India, commenting on achievements like the successful Mars mission and challenges like paucity of infrastructure and funding¹. The performance of the country’s top research organizations is measured using the weighted fractional count (WFC) of articles published from these organizations in selected scientific journals of repute^3,4 [Read more  about Nature Index, FC and WFC^3,4]. Together, the five IISERs (Pune, Bhopal, Mohali, Kolkata, and Thiruvananthapuram) have a WFC of 75.88 and a total article count of 106 for the year 2014^1,2. The report has also analysed discipline-wise contributions and notes that Indian institutes, including the IISERs, publish more papers in Chemistry as compared to other research areas¹.

1. India, Nature Index 2015 Asia Pacific, 2015 519(7544):S66-S67 [PDF]
2. Nature Index Tables, Nature Index 2015 Asia Pacific, 2015 519(7544):S78-S86 [PDF]
3. A Guide to the Nature Index, Nature Index 2015 Asia Pacific, 2015 519(7544):S75 [PDF]
4. http://feedback.natureindex.com/knowledgebase/articles/all

-Reported by Apurva Barve