A recent study prepared by Elsevier for the UK's Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and based on Scopus data, shows that India has achieved substantial growth in research articles output, increasing from 54 thousand in 2008 to 93 thousand in 2012 at an annualized growth rate of 14.4 percent. This is a rate higher than that of China (10.9 percent), Brazil (7.9 percent), Russia (1.9 percent) and the U.K. (2.9 percent).
Over the same period from 2008 to 2012, India's share of the top 10 percent of the most cited articles – a proxy for high quality research articles – rose from 2.0 percent to 3.1 percent at an annual growth rate of 11.3 percent, which is higher than Brazil (7.6 percent), Russia (8.4 percent) and the U.K. (- 2.7 percent). Only China surpassed India with a 13.8 percent annual growth rate.
India's field-weighted citation impact (FWCI) – normalised at value of "1" as the world average – is below average at 0.75 and is declining at a rate of 1.6 percent per year. China has a comparable FWCI to India, but is experiencing an upward annual growth rate of 2.4 percent. The field-weighted citation impact is generally considered to be a good indicator for quality.
The report indicates that when India collaborates internationally, the articles with Indian and international co-authors are associated with 111 percent greater FWCI than articles with single institution co-authorship.
India's international co-authorship is modest with a share of 16.2 percent in 2012, behind Brazil (24.2 percent), Russia (29.8 percent) and the U.K. (47.6 percent). Only China's international co-author share is below India's at 14.9 percent.
On India's performance in patents, the number of patents granted to India in 2012 is 3588, a figure that is higher than Brazil's (1027), but considerably lower than the numbers for the U.K. (20,194), Russia (24,551) and much farther behind China (152,102).
Dr. Michiel Kolman, Senior Vice-President of Academic Relations at Elsevier, revealed that the proportion of Indian research cited in patents is relatively low. The relative share of India's patent citations to articles published from 2007 to 2011 is at 1.50 for the UK, and generally lower amongst the BRIC countries: India (0.65), China (0.54), Russia (0.42) and Brazil (0.44).
