CORRESPONDENCE CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 115, NO. 6, 25 SEPTEMBER 2018 1018 them is identifying merited students. In fact, this is an issue which does not have simple solutions like falling back on the grades of the institute which awards the degree. A mechanism needs to be evol- ved for this purpose and the community needs to spend time to evolve a process by which it is largely satisfactory. Then there is the issue of the largesse offered by PMFS. This needs to be trimmed down significantly so that presumed merit is not rewarded disproportionately. The contingency amount that goes with the fellowship is reasonable and should be retained at the same level. A fellow should be allowed to utilize the contin- gency for attending reputed schools and workshops anywhere in India or abroad. A fellow must also be allowed to utilize the grant for collaborative work in any national or international laboratory for a short period of time. The period of the fellowship should also be reduced to two or three years, with the regular fellow- ship coming into force for the remaining period. It is important to learn lessons from the shortcomings of similar schemes such as Shyama Prasad Mukherjee Fel- lowships and Inspire Fellowships to take corrective measures. To conclude, the PMFS for students who will pursue research in IISc and IITs is severely flawed and the issue needs to be taken up by the Science Academies of the country with the Government for introducing corrective measures. I sin- cerely hope this will lead to better im- plementation of the PMFS for the benefit of science and the scientific community at large. S. RAMASESHA Solid State and Structural Chemistry Unit, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru 560 012, India e-mail: ramasesh@iisc.ac.in CSIR institutions in SIR 2018 Unlike other ranking exercises which deal only with universities and higher educational institutions, the SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) also cover research-focused institutions in the government and private sector. The latest (2018) version of the report 1 has appeared online. SIR is a secondary evaluation exercise yielding a composite indicator that combines three different sets of indicators based on research per- formance (50% of the total weight, using primary bibliometric data from SCOPUS), innovation outputs (30% of the total weight, based on PATSTAT) and societal impact measured by their web visibility (20% of the total weight). Until 2015, as background data was also released, it was possible with the help of indirect surrogate performance indicators 2,3 , to see the time evolution of progress of leading research-focused institutions over reasonably long windows (e.g. a seven-year window of 2009–2015 in ref. 2). For several years now we have reported in these pages 2–5 the progress of CSIR institutions within India and globally. Ranking is based on results generated each year from the data re- trieved over a period of five years ending two years before the edition of the rank- ing. For instance, rankings for 2018 are based on results from the five-year period 2012–2016. The only exception is the case of web indicators which have only been calculated for the last year. In- stitutions are included if they had pub- lished at least 100 works in the SCOPUS database during the last year of the selected time period. The latest release allows us to track rankings continuously from 2009 to 2018, with gaps appearing whenever institutions fall out of the net for not meeting the inclusion criterion. In SIR 2018, 5632 institutions are ranked globally, of which 271 are from India (i.e. 4.8%). SIR 2018 shows that the government sector in India accounts for 62 institutions (up from 60 last year 5 ), the health sector for 12 (down from 13 last year) and the higher education sector for 197 (179 last year). This year, there is not a single research-focused institu- tion from the private sector; Tata Sons Ltd was the solitary presence in 2016 in this sector 4 . In 2018, 30 of the constituent laboratories of the CSIR make this cut (compared to 29 in the previous year). CSIR as a whole is also counted and 30 constituent institutions are listed separately. Four agencies make the list from India; apart from CSIR, we also have the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, the Defence Research and Development Organisation, and the Indian Space Research Organisation. Table 1 shows the evolution of the rankings of the Table 1. National and global rankings of the four ‘parent’ agencies from India from 2009 to 2018 Indian Rank Global rank 2018 Agency 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 1 Council of Scientific and Industrial Research 135 142 130 117 111 102 105 99 75 132 12 Indian Council of Agricultural Research 682 666 627 589 540 516 498 509 491 563 22 Defence Research and Development Organisation 706 697 674 646 608 590 591 615 569 619 38 Indian Space Research Organisation 819 810 781 731 681 648 643 646 638 691