2015 ARWU: IISc, Only Indian University Ranks Among Top 500

London: "One Indian university ranked among the top 500 university rankings. Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, the only university ranks between 301-400," according to the 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) released by Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

In 2003 and 2004, IISc was still India's only entry and was ranked around 200. The rank has fallen drastically in 2015.

Over 1,200 universities are ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 are published.

Of the total, 8 universities from US have been ranked in the Top 10 and other 2 universities being UK-based. While more than 51 US institutions feature in the top 100.

According to TOI, Harvard University retains the number 1 position in the world for the 13th year. The other top 10 universities being Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Cambridge, Princeton, Caltech, Columbia, Chicago and Oxford.

In continental Europe, ETH Zurich (20th) in Switzerland bags the first place and University of Copenhagen (35th) in Denmark overtakes Pierre & Marie Curie (36th) in France as the second best university in this region.

In Asia, University of Tokyo (21st) and Kyoto University (26th) hold the top positions. University of Melbourne (44th) tops other universities in Oceania.

For the first time, University of Warwick (92nd) in UK enters the Top 100 list. There are totally 11 universities listed in the Top 500 list in 2015, among which Queensland University of Technology in Australia and Sharif University of Technology in Iran make their first appearance.

To rank the world universities, ARWU uses certain key objective indicators, which included number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, the number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Reuters, the number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science and per capita performance of a university.

India fails miserably in almost all counts specially in terms of global research output. Global research output in 2010 was 3.5% from India.

India's share of world research output in clinical medicine was a paltry 1.9% in 2010, with psychiatry at 0.5%, neurosciences at 1.4%, immunology at 1.8%, molecular biology at 2.1% and environmental research at 3.5%. In mathematics, India's share of world output stood at around 2% in 2010, while it was 17% for China.

In materials sciences, India's share was at 6.4% while China's stood at 26%, and India's physics research was 4.6% while China's was 19%.

"India has been the sleeping giant of Asia. Research in the university sector, stagnant for at least two decades, is now accelerating but it will be a long haul to restore India as an Asian knowledge hub," said the report.

Over 800 universities worldwide submitted data for analysis of which 20 universities were from India.