Public Health Foundation of India surpasses Harvard, bags second place in global rankings for schools of public health

The rankings are part of a report titled ‘A New Model for Ranking Schools of Public Health: The Public Health Academic Ranking’ published in the International Journal of Public Health.

“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 (who has served two terms as director-general of World Health Organization) and others said.

The project was funded by the Institute of Global Health, University of Geneva. The authors of the report said that given the importance of public health, the common use of rankings in the academic world, and the demand for a valid ranking system, a ranking for schools of public health was designed and tested.

“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.

When contacted, Professor K Srinath Reddy, honorary distinguished professor and goodwill ambassador of PHFI for public health partnerships, told The Indian Express that this recognition was gratifying.

“Public health is pivotal to national development and global security. PHFI has established six institutes in different regions of India to promote multidisciplinary education and research which can inform and assist multi-sectoral policies and programmes for protecting people’s health. It has aimed to be locally relevant, nationally impactful, and globally respected. This recognition is gratifying since it shows we have been on the right path. It is yet another vindication of the respect the world has for Indian science,” Reddy said.

Reddy is a former president of PHFI and headed the Department of Cardiology at All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

“It is interesting to note that this school (Public Health Foundation of India) ranks exceptionally well not because of the ‘productivity’ criterion (as might have been felt given the network bringing together numerous schools in the same country) but thanks to the ‘quality’ criterion, which are all at the maximum,” the report states.

When contacted Dr Vikram Patel, Chair, Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School told The Indian Express that this was a proud day for Indian science.“Rarely has any Indian institution been ranked so high globally. This feat is even more remarkable considering that PHFI was stripped of its  Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) license in 2017 greatly restricting its research mission.”

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was widely recognized that more robust public health efforts are needed and strong public health requires not only excellent educational programmes but also state-of-the-art research, the authors of the report said. Hence, as an initial step, they did not seek to evaluate the fields of education and teaching but developed a ranking based purely on bibliometric indicators evaluating the research field of public health.

To design the PHAR, the report’s authors used research analytics tool InCites Benchmarking and Analytics and the database of citation index Web of Science Core Collection. They collected bibliometric data on 26 schools of public health from each continent, between August and September 2022. Eleven research indicators/scores, covering four criteria (productivity, quality, accessibility for readers, international collaboration), for the period 2017–2021 were included. 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.

“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,” authors of the report have said.

Public Health Academic Ranking – The Top 10

1. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine/United Kingdom
2. Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI)/India
3. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University/United States
4. Swiss School of Public Health (SSPH+)/Switzerland
5. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health/United States
6. Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU), Tropical Health Network/Thailand
7. School of Public Health, University of Cape Town/South Africa
8. Institute of Population Health, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine/United Kingdom
9. Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore/Singapore
10. Barcelona Institute for Global Health, ISGlobal/Spain