A new Thomson Reuters analysis is another testimony to India’s traditional stronghold in chemistry, physics and material sciences research.

At an award ceremony this week (september 12, 2012) in New Delhi, Thomson Reuters honoured 10 of India’s leading researchers based on their citation impact analysis. The award recipients were from the fields of chemistry, physics, materials science and nanotechnology. Two of them were from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune. We featured another couple of them in a  blog in October, 2010 when the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award and the Infosys awards were announced in the same month.

The scientists honoured for their cutting edge work by Thomson Reuters are Anunay Samanta of the University of Hyderabad; Murali Sastry, DSM India Private Limited, Gurgaon; Rabin Banerjee, S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences, Kolkata;  Sandip P Trivedi, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai; Sarit Kumar Das, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras; Thanu Padmanabhan & Varun Sahni, both from IUCAA, Pune; Umesh Vasudeo Waghmare, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), Bangalore; Velayutham Murugesan, Anna University, Chennai and Vinod Kumar Garg, Guru Jambheshwar University of Science and Technology, Hisar.

Our hearty congratulations to them!

According to the ‘Essential Science Indicators’ data of Thomson Reuters, India is ranked number 16 worldwide on the basis of total scientific paper citations in journals indexed by them between January 2001 and August 2011. And physical sciences clearly stand as winners for India.

In 2008, Thomson Reuters had chronicled the growth of papers in India from about 20,000 in 2003 to 27,000 in 2007.  Materials Science had the steepest growth from 432 papers in 1981 to 2,300 papers in 2007. India’s share of world papers (2003-2007) was also comparatively high in agricultural sciences (5.17% of the database), Chemistry (5.04%), and Physics (3.88%). Overall, all but three of the top ten research fronts with the highest representation of India institutions were in high-energy or theoretical physics.

Great times for physical sciences in this country!