Monthly Archives: August 2008

Asia rising

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The India-China scientific cooperation is riding a new high, or so it seems, if one were to solely consider the number of papers that scientists in the two countries write in collaboration. A new study by Subbiah Arunachalam and B. Viswanathan published in Current Science quotes the Science Citation Index to show that papers co-authored by Indian and Chinese scientists have gone up from 124 in 2000 to 361 in 2007.

Among collaborations, multidisciplinary physics, physics of particles and fields, astronomy and astrophysics, nuclear physics and applied physics top the list.

According to the SCI figures, Indian scientists were publishing more than Chinese about 11 years back. China surpassed India in 1997 when Chinese scientists published 17,177 papers in SCI-indexed journals, as against 16,909 papers published by their Indian peers.

Last year, China had 2.76 times more papers than India. Considering that the neighbours are two of the most populous countries of the world, the competition is heartening. The Asian scientific community is truly buzzing!

Climate network

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In the biggest ever climate change research networking in India, 75 institutes will come together to conduct scientific and economic studies steered by the country’s ministry of environment and forests. The results will form part of the national report to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The India Institute of Tropical Meteorology will play a key role in defining the scope and expanse of the studies. The project will focus primarily on the impact of climate change on the country — its water resources, agriculture, forests, health, energy and economy among a few variables. This promises to be the most comprehensive climate change research consortium ever constituted in this country. It will be well worth waiting to see the results of the studies and how they match up with western projections for India.