India's most cited scientists

21st in papers published and 13th in number of citations

Indian scientific research, the papers born of it and the citations due to researchers are on the growth path. And these will continue to grow.

It is important therefore for India to continue to promote scientific endeavour and discovery to make sure of the same," said Jeffrey Clovis, Director, Thomson Scientific USA.

He was speaking on Research Day conducted on Sunday and orgnaised jointly by Thomson Scientific and Informatics India to honour some of the most cited among Indian scientists across various fields. All of these scientists were presented with Citation Laureates Awards.

"Citations or references in published papers is one of the ways to systematically collect and analyze scientific trends. Analysis based on it can also help make more rational decisions in the present situation of every increasing competition for diminishing funds. And those are the reasons why we have worked on whole databases to track citations in peer reviewed literature and science journals over the last 55 years," said Clovis.

While mentioning that the number of scientific papers from India had gone up, from 66,000 in 81-85 to 90,000 in the last five years, Clovis said that growth rates had been similar in the rest of the world, which meant that India still ranks on the lower range, especially in the area of number of cites.

According to a study conducted by Thomson Scientific called ISIhighlycited among 149 countries, while India ranks 21in the number of papers published and 13 in the number of citations given out, it ranked as low as 119 in 'impact' or number of cites per paper.

In fact, the event was organised with the objective of encouraging contemporary research in India by honouring the top most cited scientists from the country.

Researchers honoured at the event included, Soumitro Banerjee, IIT - Kharagpur (Engineering), Jayaraman Chandrasekhar, IISc (Chemistry), Atul H Chokshi, IISc (Materials Science), K L Chopra, IIT-Delhi (Materials Science), Sadhan Kumar De, IIT-Kharagpur (Materials Science), Vinod Kumar Gupta, IIT-Roorkee (Ecology/Environmental Science) and Narendra K Karmarkar, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (Mathematics and Computer Science). They were all presented with Citation Laureates.

Thomson Scientific, a division of Thomson Corporation, provides integrated information solutions to researchers and other profesionnals. Informatics promotes e-information acess to global scientific and research information. The Research Day is a first time event in the country.

Speaking during the event, Prof V N Rajasekharan Pillai, Vice Chairman, University Grants Commission, said, "I appreciate fully the work being done by Thomson and the points that they have presented here. I would like to point out though that there is a lot of inter and trans disciplinary approaches that is happening today. For example, a lot of chemists I know are writing in biology journals, which means their cites will not be counted in the chemistry discipline. These are certain possible pitfalls in analysis that has to be kept in mind.