India lags behind China in IT research

Updated on: Thursday, January 05, 2012

China is the undisputed leader in computer sciences in the developing world, even though India's trade volume in the information technology sector is pegged at an impressive $63.7 billion.

In the last five years up to 2010, while India produced 25,400 papers on computer sciences, China published 222, 900 papers on the subject. These figures are based on 2006-2010 data from SciVal Spotlight, a research tool developed by leading scientific publisher Elsevier. The data will be presented by Elsevier's senior vice president Michiel Kolman at the congress.

Data, to be released by Elsevier's senior vice president Michiel Kolman at the ongoing Indian National Science Congress here on Thursday, shows that India might be one of the leading lights of the IT sector, but it does not produce top-end new research in computer sciences.

Not even half the papers published in computing science can be categorized as competency or leadership defined on the basis of article market share, citation share etc. India does, however, excel in chemistry. It produces 20.3% of the total pie of scientific literature on chemistry. Nearly 40% of the scientific papers recognized as "leadership articles" were also in chemistry, followed by engineering (14.7%), mathematics and physics (10.3%).

In medical sciences too, India is not doing much cutting-edge work if the leadership levels of published research are any indication. Only 4% of the published work was cited as falling in the leadership category, while overall 11% were brought out in medical sciences. China, although a leader in computer science, shows a similar trend in medical sciences.

India, however, is among the top 10 when measured for output and is growing at one of the highest rates at 14%. The average quality of the papers is also increasing over the past five years. But in an odd phenomenon the papers being published in collaboration with scientists and institutions from the rest of the world is falling over time. This could have to do with the fact that a lot of new research is coming out of centres. besides the established scientific institutions that are not all that networked into the international community.

Though the growth in numbers is coming from universities and possibly new institutes, the established players in S&T research still occupy top 10 slots, headed by Indian Institute of Science and followed by CSIR labs on chemistry and physics and IIT-Kharagpur. In terms of quality of research, CSIR labs for chemistry and physics and Tata Institute of Fundamental Research are doing better in India. Data shows Punjab University is the odd one out. Though Punjab University is producing less than the other top 10 institutions, it is ranked much higher on quality than most.

Times of India

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