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Nature Index India analysis reports surge in publication

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Indian Science Ascending report release

Indian Science Ascending report released

A new analytics report from Nature Index — ‘Indian Science Ascending’  — released today, notes a surge in high-quality scientific publication in India between 2012 and 2014. The report, produced jointly by Springer Nature and the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), reveals that in high tier journals, Indian academic institutions co-author more papers with international companies than with domestic firms. The report was released at the CII Global Higher Education summit in New Delhi.

The analysis is the first of a new style of reports that further probe data from the Nature Index to answer questions about India’s place in global science, especially when compared with countries that have similar volumes of index output in 2014 and with broadly similar economic conditions (including Australia, Brazil, Italy, Russia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan).

The Nature Index database tracks the author affiliations of nearly 60,000 scientific articles published in an independently selected group of 68 high-quality science journals, and charts publication productivity for institutions and countries. The Nature Index report Indian Science Ascending shows a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8% between 2012 and 2014 in the output of top-quality science in the country.

The report also chronicles India’s particular strength in the broad discipline of Chemistry, which shows the largest increase in CAGR of 8.6% among the comparator countries. The collaboration analysis reports that India’s international collaboration far outweighs domestic collaboration, and zooming into links between industry and academia reveals that Indian academic institutions collaborate mainly with international corporations through their international branches.

India_white-paper-int6_Page_01Here are the key highlights of the report:

  • At number 13, India is among the top 15 countries globally in the Nature Index 2014.
  • India’s research output has grown steadily since 2012, showing stronger CAGR of 8% than other countries with comparable output and economic conditions.
  • Chemistry continues to be India’s strongest research area with 50 per cent of India’s overall Nature Index output coming from Chemistry alone.
  • The US is India’s top collaborator followed by Germany. India collaborates with 85 countries, mostly in Europe. Other strong collaborative ties include East Asia and Australia.
  • Institutions in India collaborate mostly with inter­national counterparts, but their largest collaborations tend to be with other domestic institutions.
  • Industry–academia collaboration is yet to take off in India, but Indian academic institutions have good col­laborative ties with international cor­porations.

President Designate, CII, Naushad Forbes said,“There’s a common perception that India fails to produce anything of significant scientific value, but this report presents a refreshingly different picture of Indian science, supported by evidence – a fact reflected in its title: India’s Ascent Towards World Class Science. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently launched a single-window mechanism called “Imprint” for release of R&D funds to academic institutions along with other policy measures. Hopefully soon then, our “historic love affair with chemistry”, aptly highlighted in this report, will be replicated in other areas of science too.”

According to Antoine Bocquet, Springer Nature Vice President Sales, Japan, India, Southeast Asia and Oceania: “Since its launch in 2014, the Nature Index has provided a new way to look at the scientific literature and the research organizations that contribute to it. India’s investment into R&D has stayed less than 1 per cent of its GDP for the past 2 decades, although the growth in Indian output in the index shows a steady increase. With other new initiatives by the Indian government such as tax incentives for R&D, we are excited to see the outcome in future years and continue working with CII to track the country’s growth both in the quantity of high-quality research and diversity in collaboration patterns. India will continue to be a driver of growth in both the quantity and quality of global research and a country to watch closely.”

India’s scientific literature count highest in central and south Asia

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The Nature Index 2014 is out.

The index is a tool to track and quantify research — it tracks contributions by countries and by research institutions to 68 top scientific journals (why these 68?), independently chosen by active scientists. Analysis of this database provides insight into global hotspots for high-quality research.

Nature Index seeks to provide an indicator of patterns of high-quality research output across the globe. It’s a free resource — snapshot data from the Nature Index are openly available under a Creative Commons licence, so that users can analyse scientific research outputs themselves.

For the purposes of the supplement, the editors have divided up the world into nine regions. India figures in the Central and South Asia region alongside Pakistan, Bangladesh and  Kazakhstan. Not surprisingly, India comes up trumps in the region.

Central and South Asia

{credit}Nature Index 2014{/credit}

Article count (AC): 1,574 Fractional count (FC): 986 Weighted fractional count (WFC): 879 [What are these?]

Here’s an analysis¹ I wrote for the region (reproduced from the index — full article here).

Asia’s traditional strengths in chemistry and physical sciences continue to power scientific pursuits and collaborations in Central and South Asian countries. Asia’s historic love affair with chemistry and physics is noteworthy. So much so that the topic is a common conversation starter when international scientists meet at a conference dinner.

So it’s not surprising that, in sharp contrast with global publication trends in the Nature Index, 2013 papers from the Central and South Asian region slant steeply toward chemistry and the physical sciences. The scientific output of the region is dominated by India — with a population of 1.3 billion and growing — towering over the region’s second-highest performing country and her politically volatile neighbour, Pakistan.

Transitioning from a developing country to an emerging economic superpower, India is experiencing an attendant surge in its share of the world’s scientific publications. The recovery is largely the result of liberalization, part of the country’s rapid economic growth post-2000. Though allocated funds for science and technology have stagnated at around 1% of GDP over the last two decades, the economic boom means that the absolute amount of money available for scientific research and development has increased. In the 2014 annual budget, India announced a 4% hike in allocations to science-related ministries setting aside 362.69 billion rupees (US$6 billion) for research.

Nandula Raghuram, a keen metrics watcher and professor at New Delhi-based Guru Govind Singh Indraprastha University, says, “In many consecutive meetings of the Indian Science Congress, our prime ministers have expressed the need to double the investment for science and technology and bring it to 2% of GDP. It is shameful that this has never happened.”

The Indian government has been urging the private sector to invest more in science but Raghuram says private investment should not be relied on to substitute government funding, which accounts for the lion’s share of science capital in India.

Pakistan, which began its life as an independent country a day before India in August 1947, did not have many scientific institutions when it struck out alone. Despite years of instability and political turmoil it now has a handful of credible scientific institutions. The country spends 0.59% of GDP on science and technology (S&T) and is aiming to ramp that up to 2%, by 2020. The country’s new science and technology policy tries to connect science with socio-economic development, primarily concentrating on demand-driven research that might help the economy, and through international partnerships. It has some way to go: although India and Pakistan both have roughly the same number of researchers per capita (about 150–160 per million of population), India’s scientists are more efficient, producing more than four times as many papers each.

Pakistan’s political uncertainties continue to eclipse all its developmental endeavours. In a national science and technology policy released in 2012, then science minister Mir Changez Khan Jamali conceded that these exigencies have relegated S&T efforts to the back burner. In the baby steps that Pakistan is taking to shape its research efforts, the focus is on using science to boost the economy through technology transfer projects in metrology, environment, health, energy, biotechnology, agriculture, genetic engineering, electronics and nanotechnology.

Pakistan’s Quaid-i-Azam University has an article count (AC) of 52 in the index, the vast majority in the physical sciences (86.1%). The success stems mostly from its natural science faculty, a central part of the university since its foundation. Faculty dean, Mohammed Zakaullah, says most of its research is highly applied.

Two papers in the journal Applied Physics Letters that best show the university’s strength, wholly authored by its researchers, detail behaviours of “relaxors” — a class of materials that change shape when an electric field is applied — both of which have immediate applications.

Success story

The Indian success story contains highlights of scientific brilliance in recent years, especially in material science, nanosciences and astrophysics, at its many Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). These technology schools have the highest WFC, which gives a measure of the relative contribution of an institution to each paper, in the region, followed by the government-funded laboratories of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER). Researchers from the IISERs contributed to three papers inNature and Science in 2013, the highest contribution for any Indian institution; the country as a whole only managed 11 papers.

IITs and IISERs are conglomerates or groups of institutes. The standalone institute that shines through is the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) with its formidable chemistry and physical sciences departments producing the highest weighted fractional count or WFC (83) of the country’s individual centres. Institute director Anurag Kumar attributes this success to the fact that new faculty members are provided with start-up research funding, “so that they can get their research programmes off the ground without having to wait for their first grants.” IISc also has an ongoing programme that provides seed grants to groups, which most often go on to win large value grants. Of the institution’s 132 articles, 60 were wholly authored in-house (an FC of 1), an impressive display of independence. Five of these were in Physical Review Letters, including a paper that upped the theoretical mass limit for a star to turn into a type 1a supernova, which did particularly well on Twitter, according to altmetrics.com data.

In the field of physical science, meanwhile, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research out-produced IISc in 2013, with a WFC second only to the combined IITs. With its stronghold — fundamental research in particle physics and astrophysics — Tata scientists made a mark with their contribution to the CERN experiments that led to the discovery of the Higgs-boson particle. (More)

References:

1. Central & South Asia, Nature Index, Nature 515, S89–S90 (2014) doi: 10.1038/515S89a