Profiles of Indian Authors Among the Top 100,000 Scientists Worldwide on Standardized Citation Metrics

Abstract

A publicly available database of 100,000 scientists was compiled by Ioannidis et al. (2019a), which provides standardized author citation metrics based on their SCOPUS records. The scientists were classified into 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields, and career-long data were updated by the end of 2018. Among the top 105,000 authors, 644 Indian authors were identified (0.006%). In this study, the profiles of those 644 Indian authors were explored in citation metrics, functional field and affiliation. The overall quality of Indian authors was lower than the global average based on citation metrics. The majority of the 644 Indian authors were affiliated with Institutions of National Importance or Government research bodies. Also, there was high representation of authors from only three scientific fields; Physics, Chemistry and Clinical Medicine. The paper highlighted few key existent trends in the Indian academic space, and also identified areas of improvement for the future. There remains huge scope for improving the quality of Indian research and publication. Meaningful improvements at all levels of the education sector are essential to achieve quality metrics for the future