The growing trend of India's participation in planetary science research

Abstract

PurposeThe present investigation aims to present the status of planetary science research in India using different scientometric indicators, as reflected in the Web of Science Core Collection database.Design/methodology/approachThe researcher adopted systematic approaches to retrieve the data from the Web of Science Core Collection database for 20 years by using AAS Astronomical subject keywords. A total of 1,504 Indian publications and 55,572 World's publications were considered for analysis. The data were analyzed using the biblioshiny application of bibliometrix to investigate the most productive countries/territories, institutions, authors, research fields, journals, keywords, and h, g-index. The VOSviewer program is used to construct and visualize scientometric networks and analyze the co-occurrence of terms. “Webometric Analyst 2.0” is used to retrieve the Altmetric attention scores for the articles.FindingsThe results revealed that the publications on planetary science research has increased over time, with an annual growth rate of 9.66%. The study also revealed the prolific authors and institutions, productive journals and most frequently cited journals. The USA was the major collaborating partner of India. The results also provided valuable information on the citations made to these papers on planetary science, including a total number of citations, average citations per item, cited rate and h-index. There were 28,086 citations to 1,504 papers. The top 67 citation papers were the h-core papers on planetary science in India. Altmetric score for planetary science articles ranged from 1 to 2,418. Twitter (69%), news outlets (16%), blogs (6%), and Facebook (6%) were the most popular Altmetric data resources.Originality/valueThis investigation is the first attempt to employ scientometrics and visualization techniques to planetary science research in India.