Indian and Chinese scientists are increasingly working together, but it might still take a few more years before it becomes significant or sets the pace for South-South scientific collaboration. This is according to a study recently published in Current Science, an Indian science publication.
The study, titled 'South-South cooperation: The case of Indo-Chinese collaboration in scientific research', says that from 2004 onwards there has been a slow but noticeable rise in collaboration. Till 2003, only about three-fourth of 1 percent of Indian papers were written in collaboration with Chinese authors, the study pointed.
It is observed that until a little over a decade ago, scientists in India were publishing a larger number of papers than those in China in journals indexed by the global 'Science Citation Index'. In 1997, China overtook India when its scientists published 17,177 papers in SCI-indexed journals, as against 16,909 published by Indian scientists. Since then, China has accelerated the pace of R&D and, in 2007, the country accounted for more than 2.76 times the number of papers from India.
The study further states that the number of Indo-Chinese papers has steadily increased from 124 in 2000 to 361 in 2007. Over this period researchers from India and China co-authored 1,807 papers. Of these, 1,682 were articles, 45 were reviews, 18 were letters and 36 were meeting abstracts. Physics was found to be the most prominent area of Indo-China collaboration.
The study also noted that other prominent nations on the global research scene considered collaboration with China to a much larger extent than with India. The ratio of researchers preferring China over India for different countries was 4.2 for Japan, 3.52 for the US, 2.42 for South Korea, 2.30 for Russia and 1.95 for France.
While collaborative research efforts continue to grow in both these Asian countries, another prominent trend is that some leading publishers are showing interest in the Asia/Asia Pacific regions. For instance, Nature Publishing Group (NPG) formed NPG Nature Asia-Pacific in January 2006, in response to the rapid growth in output of research from the region. Almost a year later, the company launched its first country-specific portal - Nature China (www.nature.com/nchina) - in February 2007. This was followed by the launch of Nature India (www.nature.com/natureindia), a new website highlighting best scientific research from researchers based in the country, in February 2008.
