Indian chemists’ paper publishing, citation frequency said to lag

Chemistry research in India is advancing, but slowly, despite an increase in published articles in recent years, according to meta-analyses by a team of scientists (Curr. Sci., 2017, DOI: 10.18520/cs/v112/i07/1330-1339).

The study examines the number of papers published by chemists in India—and how frequently they were cited—in leading multidisciplinary chemistry journals from 1991 to 2015.

“India’s chemistry output is far behind China. India accounts for only a small number of papers in the top one percentile of the most highly cited chemistry papers, whereas China leads the world,” says the study led by Subbiah Arunachalam at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru. “Only 2.3% of the 2,234 papers published in 2014 that are in the top one percentile is from India compared to 38% from China.”

Also, the team found that no chemist working at an Indian institution made the Thomson Reuters list of the world’s top 100 chemists based on the impact of research they published from 2000 to 2010. In contrast, three chemists in South Korea and one each in Brazil and South Africa made the list, the study points out.

The team carried out its scientometric analyses using Elsevier’s Scopus, an abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Scientometrics uses databases of information to measure scientific output and impact.

India’s share of papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society was 0.7% during the 25 years covered in the study. ACS publishes C&EN.