3,898 Indian scientists among the ‘World’s Top 2%’ list

3,898 Indian scientists feature in the 2026 edition of the world’s top 2% scientists list, with researchers from 1,185 academic institutions. Among academic institutions, the Indian Institute of Science leads with 139 researchers. The Indian Institute of Technology Delhi is second with 114 researchers on the list.

Stanford University researchers prepared the list with the help of bibliometric indicators, published by Elsevier. Parameters include citations, h-index, co-authorship and author positions with impact in a single year and impact in a career.

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Integrity challenges in bibliometric rankings

Despite broad institutional representation, academics and officials are raising increasing concerns about the utility of the dataset. Simply being in the dataset does not determine the quality of scientific research. India Research Watch (IRW) mentioned in their recent LinkedIn post “Presence in the list does not necessarily imply good quality work. In fact there are people with more than 100 retractions in the list!” 

IRW also added “There are also people with over 90% self citations in the list. Some even have 100% self citation rate. IRW raised concerns among scholars, stating, “we must be careful to not interpret presence in the list as a big achievement”, warning against using the compilation as a definitive ranking, as dependence on raw metrics can distort proper scientific assessment.

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Methodology and institutional metrics

The assessment is based on citation data from Scopus as of August 1, 2026. The composite citation score both with and without self-citations for assessment is now used by researchers all over the world. The list of scientists includes those in the top 100,000 in the world, or the top 2% in their sub-fields.

The Science-Metrix classification system groups 22 broad scientific fields and 174 sub-fields. Percentile rankings are for scientists with 5+ publications. However, private colleges also reported faculty inclusion apart from government institutions. Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology stated that 34 faculty members featured in the single-year impact list, with 13 in the career-long impact list.

National Institute of Technology (NIT) Rourkela reported 29 faculty members and one research graduate got featured in the list in various disciplines like life sciences, mathematics and engineering. The faculty members who are featured in the list include Snehashish Chakraverty, Ajit Behera, Santanu Paria, Surajit Das, Kunal Pal, Sujit Kumar Bhutia, Bankim Chandra Ray, Ritwik Sarkar, Narayan Sethi, Balasubramanian P, and Mohd Khalid Gul.

The institute also said Srimanta Patra, a former PhD scholar of the institute who is currently serving as a DST-INSPIRE Faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati, has been named among the world’s top 2% of scientists in 2026, alongside 3,898 other Indian scientists. Nineteen scientists from the institution featured in the career-long category.

Correction: The previous-year reference has been removed, and the copy has been corrected to reflect the career-long data.