Scientific productivity and Impact of Indian Polymer scientists (1992–2006): An Informetric study

Abstract

All scientific research end up as publications in open literature or as classified documents, in print or digital form. In India, scientific literature has increased as a result of increase in investments in Science and Technology, improvement in Research and Development infrastructure, and increase in research activities. The situation calls for monitoring and measuring the performance of the country in Science and Technology. Several informetric indicators such as scientific productivity and impact of individual scientists and institutions based on the quantity and quality of research publications, scattering of literature across Indian and foreign journals, and nature of collaboration have been developed to measure the performance of individuals and institutions in a country in various disciplines. In this context, an attempt is made to understand the status of Polymer Science research in India using Chemical s database on CD-ROM as the source for collecting the required data for the period of 1992 to 2006. 37 Keywords for representing Polymer Science were selected with the help of Polymer Indexing Thesaurus and the subject experts. A total of 22000 bibliographic entries were downloaded with the help of keywords and occurrence of the term ‘India’ in affiliation of the first author for the period 1992 to 2006. After verification of these records for duplicates, homonyms and synonyms, a total of 21,918 bibliographic entries with abstracts and subject descriptors were subjected to further analysis. Major findings of the study are that 99.37% of the Polymer Science literature contributed by Indian scientists were published in the form of research articles in scientific periodicals and patents. Research Institutes are the major contributors of research publications. 11.92% of the research publications were authored by single authors and remaining 88.08% of the publications were authored by joint or multiple authors. Average number of authors per publications is 4.2. The percentage of single authored publications had decreased from 14% in 1992 to 11% in 2006. The degree of collaboration (g) is 0.878, indicating very high degree of collaboration or team work in the field. Twenty four Indian authors with more than thirty publications during 1992–2006 are identified as prolific authors. Data related to the total publications during their entire career, taken from Scopus database shows that Dr. Thomas Sabu has published highest number of 528 publications. Dr. T.M. Aminabhavi has received highest number of 3822 citations and enjoys highest h-index of 31. Spearman’s Rank Correlation Co-efficient between total number of publications and (i) total citations received and (ii) h-index show high positive correlation and moderate positive correlation respectively. Correlation between total number of publications and web searches show negative correlation.