A study on research papers written by Indian researchers over 27 years (1981-2008) has revealed interesting results.
The good news first: India’s share of collaborative papers and the relative number of citations have both increased in the last few years. The bad news: India ranks seventh in terms of total output of papers among the group of countries surveyed (UK, USA, Germany, China, Japan, South Korea, France, Brazil, India and Australia). The country ranks 10th in terms of citation impact. Also, India has a relatively low share of global research publications.
The study commissioned by Research Councils, UK and conducted by a Thomson Reuters unit collates bibliometric data on India’s research output and international collaboration.
Across disciplines, India collaborates the most with USA followed by Germany and the UK. Physical sciences remain the strongest area of Indo-UK collaboration. Medical, health and biological sciences also produce a substantial volume of highly-cited research.
While in UK the Imperial College of London, Manchester University and Cambridge University remain the hotbed of UK-India co-authorship; In India, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Delhi University and Panjab University are the top three collaborative research hubs followed by the Indian Institute of Science and Indian Association for Cultivation of Science.
The study provides ample scope for policy makers and research collborators to identify emerging research areas, collaborative opportunities and potential sources of funding. On an optimistic note, the study infers that though the number of research papers written by Indian authors is relatively low in international terms, India’s research activity is growing and is likely to become increasingly important to the global research community. The low number of citations implies there are opportunities for high standard collaboration. It also leaves space for further analysis considering that the data is till 2008, after which the science funding in India has risen by 17 per cent.