University of Madras has many plans to improve its QS Rankings next year 

Encouraged by its debut in the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) Rankings this year, the University of Madras has chalked out a slew of measures to better its performance next year. From attracting foreign faculties, to signing MoUs with foreign universities for collaborative research work, the university plans to work on various fronts to improve its overall global ranking.

The university debuted in Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) rankings in the 541-550 band this year and received its certificate on Thursday. It was among 41 Indian universities that made it to the London-based QS World University Rankings 2023, released last week.

The institute scored the maximum of 94.2 out 0f 100 points in the 'citations per faculty'. This category measures university research quality with a citation per faculty metric, taking the total number of academic citations in papers produced by a university in a five-year period.  

In the 'academic reputation' and 'employer reputation', the varsity scored 8.0 and 3.6 respectively. The other parameters that QS Rankings assess are 'faculty/student ratio' and 'international research network'.

"We ranked 48th globally in the 'citations for faculty' category of the QS ranking. The University of Madras stands first in the country in uploading digitised PhD theses on the UGC Shodhganga database and the majority of the research work of our students and faculty is also widely published in reputed journals," said S Gowri, Vice-Chancellor of the university. So far, the university has uploaded 13162 PhD theses on Shodhganga.

According to the VC, "Our experienced faculty is a major strength and now we encourage them to work on international collaborative research projects. We also identified a few departments like English, Psychology, Fine and Performance Arts which have the potential to attract international research projects." This will help in improving our reputation globally, he added.

He further pointed out that many international professors would often visit the university as guest faculty. While practice stopped in the last decade due to a paucity of funds, the university now aims to revive it. The university also aims to assess the situation of shortage of faculty members in the university and take measures to fill it.

Gowri added that the institute's planning and development committee will meet soon with the faculty members to advise them to scrutinise ongoing research work. They also aim to attract projects from corporate bodies to solve the fund crunch.