Abstract
Global landscape of scientific activity is changing and becoming more diverse with emerging economies particularly China redrawing the contours of scientific research in the twenty-first century. Research publications, the most cherished output of science, provides robust evidence of this changing landscape. The global publication share of advanced scientific countries is decreasing with significant rise in publication share of China and also of other emerging economies such as India, South Korea, and Brazil. Their publications though are still lagging in global reception as measured through citations. However, with increasing international collaboration and publishing in promising areas and high impact journals, the citation reception of their papers is increasing. Indian publication growth is much behind China whose growth has been dramatic! However, India’s emergence is interesting as from a leading country among developing economies in scientific publications till early 1980s, her publication growth exhibited sharp decline in the late 1980s. Only from 1995 onwards India started making an assertion in the global publication race and in some promising areas of high relevance such as nanotechnology her publication growth has been impressive. India to a large extent epitomises the scientific activity of emerging economies. Thus through the lens of India’s publication trend, the paper underscores the changing global landscape of science. To place India’s publishing activity in proper context, the paper broadly examines the publication activity of some advanced OECD countries and BRICKS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Korea and South Africa) countries. Implications of this study are discussed.
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Notes
America’s President Barack Obama, State of Union Address at The White House (25 January, 2010). Strategy for American Innovation: Catalyze Breakthroughs for National Priorities (http://www.whitehouse.gov/innovation/strategy/catalyze).
Sometimes even if we observe that the result is non-significant, r values can indicate that the difference do exits. The r values of 0.10 indicates small effect, 0.30 medium effect and above 0.5 large effect (Field 2005).
O represents India’s overall publication.
The study identifies emerging research areas (also sometimes called cutting edge research fields) as those fields which are having growing influence globally. Fields of growing influence can be discerned from dedicated programs/roadmaps and strategies and high investments made by different countries (see for example strategies and funding in nanotechnology in different countries in Bhattacharya et al. 2012a). One can see in recent years, this is happening in biotechnology, nanotechnology, computational biology, synthetic biology/genomics, etc. One characteristic of these research fields is their interdisciplinary and their strong interface with technology. Studies have identified the effect of this dedicated support on research productivity. Explosive increase in nanotechnology papers is one example of this (Chen et al. 2013).
Some authors like Field (2005) consider values above 0.5 as large effect.
Citations accumulate over time and thus older papers have, on average, more citations than more recent papers. Therefore fixed citation window is taken when comparison of citation reception in two different periods is undertaken ensuring that no bias is given for papers in any particular period. However, in this study two different citation windows were taken to show that papers in 2010 are receiving reception faster inspite of longer citation window for 2008.
SJR is a size independent indicator which gives the measure of relative journal’s standing. It takes into account the citations of the journal and the closeness of cited journal using the cosine of the angle between the vectors of the co-citing journals. This quantity is then divided by the fraction of journals citable documents to reduce the effect of size. Bote and Anegon (2012) thus argue that SJR is better measure than other ranking measures like JIF because SJR is more equally distributed in different subject areas and the inclusion of cosine reduces the chances of changed journal standing in closely related areas like Chemistry and Biochemistry.
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We acknowledge the support of the ISTIP (Indian Science, Technology and Innovation Policy) project undertaken by the CSIR-NISTADS (National Institute of Science Technology and Development Studies). We thank both the referees for critical reading of our manuscript and very useful comments.
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Bhattacharya, S., Shilpa & Kaul, A. Emerging countries assertion in the global publication landscape of science: a case study of India. Scientometrics 103, 387–411 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1551-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1551-4