Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) has attained second place in the first global rankings for schools of public health. The institution has distinguished itself by standing ahead of Harvard's T H Chan School of Public Health, Swiss School of Public Health and Bloomberg School of Public Health in John Hopkins on the list.
The rankings are part of a report titled ‘A New Model for Ranking Schools of Public Health: The Public Health Academic Ranking (PHAR) published in the International Journal of Public Health. The authors of the report developed and tested a ranking for schools of public health recognizing the significance of public health, the common use of rankings in the academic world and the demand for a credible ranking system.
“As there is no ranking designed for schools of public health, this project aimed to create one. To our knowledge, the PHAR is the first international bibliometric university ranking system designed for academic public health,” lead author Adeline Dugerdil, Margaret Chan (twice director-general of World Health Organization ) and others said.
The project was funded by the Institute of Global Health, University of Geneva.
“Although two of the top five schools were from the United States, the top ten included institutions from four continents. The presence of schools from India, Thailand, South Africa and Singapore is notable and may reflect the increasing importance of public health research in non-high-income countries,” the report said.
The authors of the report affirmed the need for more robust public health efforts in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the role of excellent educational programmes and cutting-edge research in strengthening public health. Therefore, the ranking was developed purely on the basis of bibliometric indicators evaluating the research field of public health rather than the fields of education and teaching.
The report’s authors have designed PHAR utilising the InCites Benchmarking and Analytics software and Web of Science Core Collection database. The bibliometric data on 26 public health schools across all continents had incorporated 11 research indicators, encompassing four criteria- productivity, quality, accessibility for readers and international collaboration, for the period 2017–2021. For the Swiss School of Public Health (SSPH+), a network gathering faculties across different universities, a specific methodology was used, with member-specific research queries.
The report stated that PHFI ranks exceptionally well on the ‘quality’ criterion rather than ‘productivity’.
“These indicators are only one means of evaluating a university and it is important to emphasize that the overall evaluation of a school must include many other parameters, which will be developed in later phases of this project,” remarked the report’s authors.
The leading five institutions in the list include the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the Swiss School of Public Health (SSPH+) and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
(Input from various media sources)
(Rehash/Dr. Vineesha V/MSM)
