Measuring India’s research impact
The diversity of our Higher Education sector in India incorporates a huge base of research. Expanding this will be key to our future growth as a sector, and enhancing the impact of it will be critical as we build on our status as a high-tech society. We have the potential to be an intellectual economy driven innovation.
How do we measure impact in research?
Ensuring research is impactful is evidently an ideal our universities should strive for. How to suitably measure that impact is however far from straightforward and there are numerous factors at play. The number of publications produced and how often publications are citated are perhaps the most commonly considered proxies. Some measures also take into account the quality of publications.
Different fields cannot be expected to produce the same number of publications or receive the same number of citations either. Can we fairly compare a 30-page physics paper with 50 collaborators to a book by a sole author in a humanities department?
As such, the impact indicators available to us can only be considered guides rather than decisively objective tools. They do however remain valuable tools, allowing us to roughly compare the value of research in relation to other nations.
Is Indian research impactful enough?
India has climbed up the rankings in terms of research output in recent decades. The Scimago Country Rankings, based off Scopus data, place India as 4th globally in terms of its output of citable research documents. A decade ago it was 9th, and in 2000 in was 20th. The nature country research output ranking, which ranks according to high quality research output in the natural and life sciences placed India 13th globally in 2021.
Output does not however equal impact. These indicators show that India is producing a lot of research, but it falls behind on Field Weighted Citation Impact, an indicator that takes into account not only the number of citations a publication receives, but also the expected number of citations for documents similar in field and type.
Leveraging strengths for impact
India does of course have its strengths in research and expertise and should try to leverage these strengths as much as possible. The Nature index points to Chemistry as a strong point of Indian research in the natural sciences, contributing to nearly half of Indian research accounted for in their measure.
India is also known worldwide as a leader in IT and increasingly in tech in general. The US for example is focussing on AI as a key field for collaboration with India. Many of India’s potential researchers in tech fields such as engineering and computer science are however not contributing to domestic research, opting instead to study overseas.
What is holding back research impact?
India is not behind other countries on research impact because it is incapable. The reality is quite the opposite – consider that India has one of the largest education systems in the world and its research strengths are very much core areas of research globally.
From a structural perspective, one could argue that the funding is not there. Despite repeated claims from government that increased spending on research is a priority, public spending on research continues to fall. The proposed establishment of a National Research Fund (NRF) is also yet to materialise.
The structure of India’s universities also makes it harder for them to become research intensive. The confusing sea of smaller colleges affiliated to larger affiliating universities results in a less than ideal pooling of resources and expertise. As such, there are few true research institutions nationally, especially relative to the number of overall HE colleges.
Yet perhaps the largest barrier is one of perception. International collaborative research is by and large more impactful than research carried out either nationally or by sole researchers. The proportion of Indian research that is internationally collaborative is not only well below average, but an institutional culture has developed within research that holds international collaboration in disdain.
India has the potential – and our government has the desire – to be a world leading innovation hub. The national business world has certainly proven this to be true, and our universities and research institutions now can accelerate this.