Chemistry research in India: making progress, but not rapidly

Against the backdrop of comments on chemistry research in India made in three recent reports prepared by Nature Index, Elsevier and Thomson Reuters, we have made a scientometric analysis of contributions from India in leading multidisciplinary chemistry journals over the 25-year period 1991-2015. We have compared India's performance with that of China as a benchmark. Overall, the number of chemistry papers from India increased steadily between 2007 and 2014. The threeyear moving average of number of papers during the period grew at a compound annual growth rate of 8.9%, and the overall increase in papers was accompanied by a more than proportionate increase in the leading journals. Also, the average number of cites received by papers with at least one author from India in Angewandte Chemie International Edition (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed.) and Accounts of Chemical Research was higher than the world average. Despite its huge share of the world's population (similar to 17%), India continues to be poorly represented in the top journals: the country's share of papers in the Journal of the American Chemical Society is 0.7% compared to 58.4% for USA, 7.6% for Germany and 5.1% for China, and its share in Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. is 1.2% compared to 28% for Germany, 25.3% for USA and 9.9% for China. This could be due to the fact that till recently Indian universities did not encourage mobility across disciplines. That only a small number of Indian researchers and institutions publish in leading journals is also a matter for concern. India accounts for only a small number of papers in the top one percentile of the most highly cited chemistry papers, whereas China leads the world. Only 2.3% of the 2234 papers published in 2014 that are in the top one percentile is from India compared to 38% from China