Life sciences research in India is mapped based on papers published in 1998 and indexed in Biosis Biological Abstracts. The findings are compared with those of an earlier study covering the years 1992-1994. There were 8352 papers in all, and these were published in more than 1080 journals. About 55% o'f life science papers were published in 75 Indian journals and more than 82% of papers were published in journals of impact factor less than 1.0. The two areas in which the largest numbers of papers were published are Agriculture and Biochemistry and molecular biophysics. While most agriculture papers had appeared in journals of impact factor zero or less than 1.0, many Biochemistry and molecular biophysics papers were published in journals of moderate to high impact factors. There has been a tendency over the years to publish papers in journals of higher impact factor. Close to 59% of papers were published by academic institutions, much less than the 64.5% in 1992-1994. This decline in research in academic institutions needs to be addressed. This report was prepared by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and was submitted to NISSAT, Department of Scientific & Industrial Research Government of India, New Delhi in November 2001.

Life sciences research carried out in India, as seen from the journal literature indexed in three years of BIOSIS Biological Abstracts (1992-1994), is quantified and mapped. The Indian institutions active in life sciences research, the journals and sub-fields in which they publish their work, and the impact factors of the journals as seen from Journal Citation Reports 1992 and 1994 are identified. In the three years studied researchers from over 1,400 institutions located in over 450 cities/ towns have authored 20,046 papers in 1,582 journals published from 52 countries. Over 54% of these papers have appeared in 18 Indian journals. While India has contributed papers to al 10 sub-fields, her contribution has exceeded 1,000 papers in three years in only four sub-fields, and 500 papers in seven other sub-fields. Only 49 institutions have published more than 100 papers each. The contribution made by different institutions to 26 sub-fields and to 36 often used journals is highlighted. More than 64% of Indian papers indexed in BIOSIS come from academic institutions. Among scientific agencies, Indian Council of Agricultural Research and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research have published more than 1,500 papers each. In all Indian researchers have published 188 papers (less than 1.0%) in journals with a 1994 impact factor greater than 4.0. More than 46.3% of Indian papers have appeared in non-5CY journals, and a further 37.5% of papers have been published in journals with impact factors less than 1.0. The analysis reveals the existence of two clusters: a large number of institutions devoted to agriculture and classical biology, publishing mostly in low-impact journals, often in Indian journals, and a smaller group of institutions publishing some papers in new biology and some areas of medicine in quality international journals of medium impact. The larger cluster includes the agricultural universities and many general universities, while the smaller cluster includes the Indian Institute of Science, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, National Institute of Immunology, and Indian Institute of Chemical Biology. While it would be desirable for Indian researchers to publish bulk of the agricultural research and a substantial part of medical research in Indian journals, they have no such constraint in new biology and can publish their work in high-impact international journals. Yet only a small proportion of Indian papers in biochemistry and molecular biology, general and internal medicine, microbiology, biophysics, immunology, and gastroenterology have appeared in such journals.

Fish and aquaculture research in India has been mapped using data from six databases. About 460 papers, roughly 5.5% of the world output, come from India every year, of which 82% are journal articles. Close to 70% of journal articles have appeared in 113 Indian journals. Less than a third of the journal articles are published in journals indexed in SCI. About 61% of publications are contributed by government laboratories and over 25% by academic institutions. Government laboratories publish most of their work in low impact and low visibility journals and academic institutions in journals of medium impact. However, even those papers appearing in better-rated journals are not cited well. Kochi, Chennai, Mumbai and Mangalore are the cities and Tamil Nadu and Kerala are the states contributing large number of papers.

Mathematics research in India, as reflected by papers indexed in Mathsci 1990 and 1994, is quantified and mapped. There were 1319 papers originating in India and indexed in the 1990 disc of Mathsci CD-ROM version, and 1391 papers indexed in 1994. Of these 2710 papers, 2549 had appeared in 467 journals, 221 of which were indexed in Journal Citation Reports 1994. Indian researchers had published 9 papers in these two years in 62 Indian journals, 503 papers in 108 US journals, 254 papers in 40 journals from the Netherlands, and 15 papers in 42 British journals. 18 institutions located in 10 cities/towns and 23 states/union territories had contributed to India's research output indexed in Mathsci, although only three have contributed more than a hundred papers in the two years, and another nine had contributed 50 or more papers. Academic institutions had published 87% of al papers and central government funded research councils and departments accounted for 12.6%. Four cities, viz. Calcutta, New Delhi, Bombay, and Madras had published more than 20 papers each in the two years. Five states, viz. West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Delhi had published more than 250 papers each. More than 53% of journal papers were published in journals not indexed in Journal Citation Reports. Only 81 papers had appeared in journals of impact factor greater than 2.000, and these are mostly physics journals. Of the 61 subfields in Mathsci, Indian researchers had been most active in Statistics, General topolgy, Quantum theory, and Special functions. India has a high activity index for Special functions and General topology and a moderately high activity index for Statistics, Integral transforms and Operational calculus, and Sequences, series and summability. The activity is low in Prtial differential equations, Ordinary differential equations, Numerical analysis, K-theory, and Computer science. The future of mathematics in India seems to rest with DAE, TIFR and ISI. Universities seem to be losing momentum.

CAB Abstracts 1998 had indexed 11,855 publications from India, including 10,412 journal articles, from more than 1280 institutions in 531 locations. These were classified into 21 major research fields and 243 subfields. â Plants of economic importanceâ (FF) is the leading area of research in India, followed by â Animal scienceâ (LL). The three subfields with the largest number of papers are: â Pests, pathogens and biogenic diseases of plantsâ , FF600 (1301 papers), â Plant breeding and geneticsâ , FF020 (1135 papers), and â Plant productionâ , FF100 (786 papers). In contrast, there were only 54 papers in â Biotechnologyâ (WW). Academic institutions accounted for a little over 59% of the papers in 1998, as against 63.4% in the five years 1990â 1994, and scientific agencies of the central government accounted for 22% of the papers. Agricultural universities had published 4039 papers and agricultural colleges 523 papers. Indian researchers had published over 78% of the 10,412 journal articles in 208 Indian journals, 587 papers in 180 UK journals, and 368 papers in 124 US journals. In no other field do Indian researchers publish such a large per cent of papers in Indian journals. Letters journals were used only infrequently: 317 papers in 40 letters journals. More than 8060 papers were published in non-SCI journals, and 1925 papers were published in journals of impact factor less than 1.0. Only 33 papers were published in journals of impact factor higher than 3.0. We have identified institutions publishing large number of papers in different subfields, in different journals, in journals of different impact factors, etc. This macroscopic analysis not only provides an inventory of Indiaâ s publications, but also gives an idea of endogenous research capacity. If appropriately linked with public policy, it can help restructure the nationâ s research priorities.

An overview of the journals used by scientists in post Cultural Revolution China is presented based on papers published by them in the 2649 journals indexed in Science Citation Index (SCI) for the period of 1981-85 as well as in journals covered by three editions of Current Contents (CC) for the second half of 1988. We have also looked at the frequency of citation of the papers indexed in SCI 1981-85, by way of cross-reference in other papers. Clearly, China's share of the world's journals literature and the share of Chinese language papers are increasing rapidly. However, Chinese work is infrequently cited. However, papers by Chinese scientists have rarely appeared in multidisciplinary journals such as Nature and Science. The data in the literature reinforce our conclusion that growth in China's share of the world's journal literature of science has not yet flattened off.

The purpose of this research is to improve retrieval performance in systems that use assigned subject descriptors, such as library subject headings. We are looking for wider semantic boundaries surrounding summary headings assigned to documents by providing a means of identifying clustered headings that fall within the indexerâ s collective common perceptions of relevance. We are here experimenting with two techniques that can help increase both precision and recall. In earlier research citationâ chasing was employed to yield a fuller retrieval set than might have been found using subject headings alone. In the present study we are employing multiâ dimensional scaling to determine the best fit among works to which subject descriptors have been coâ assigned. A term co-occurrence matrix compiled from 19 LCSH subject headings assigned to works in the field of â language originâ is used to generate an MDS map of the semantic space. Two clusters emerge: language and languages, and evolution biology, sometimes termed evolingo. Results allow us to visualize how differing perceptions of indexers affect the semantic space surrounding assigned terms. In both cases - citation-chasing and term co-occurrence - and especially when combining the two techniques acting as thresholds for each other, it is possible to overcome the inverse relation between precision and recall.

An impact factor(IF) has been used extensively as a measure of the importance and impact of journals recently. The IF provided by the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) is calculated based on the most recent three years period. For example, the IF of 2003 for a journal is calculated; the number articles published in 2001 to 2002 cited in tracked journals during 2003 divided by the number of articles published in 2001 to 2002. In this work, we examine the different patterns of IF of journals in different fields as well as within the same field. We also provide a method of clustering journals according to the characteristics of the corresponding IF within the same field. Based on the experiences from analyzing the IF, we propose modified IFs from statistics point of view as possible new measures for the characteristics of different journals.

The paper Fundamental methodologies and tools for the employment of webometric analyses defines the most important rules to keep in mind before performing webometric analyses. The paper deals with the two basic elements, that constitutes the foundation for webometric analyses: the documents being analysed, and the tools that are applied for the data collection. The concepts of a citation theory and a link theory are discussed through a study of the current litterature. Different methodologies for uncovering motivations for making references in scientific articles are reviewed and discussed. A methodology for uncovering motivations for making links on webpages is proposed and applied on six researchers' websites at the Royal School of Library and Information Science in Denmark, and on all the institutes at the same institution and at selected institutes at The Technical University of Denmark. The paper further contains a review on the linktopology of the Internet and the current status for the tools available for data collection. Finally, alternative possible tools for applying webometric analyses are proposed. The alternative tools are the Researchindex invented by Lawrence and Giles (Lawrence, Bollacker & Giles, 1999b; Giles, Bollacker & Lawrence, 1998), Kleinberg's HITS algorithm employed in the Clever search engine (The Clever Project, n.d.; Kleinberg, 1998), Proposals for possible extensions to the HTTP protocol to facilitate the collection and navigation of backlink information in the world wide web made by Chakrabarti, Gibson and McCurley (Chakrabarti, Gibson & McCurley, 1999c) and finally Link Agent, a program we have developed for this paper. The program makes it possible to uncover the reciprocal linking webpages, that exist in relation to the outgoing links from a chosen webpage. Keywords: Informetrics, Webometrics, Citation theory, Link theory, Motivations for links, Motivations for references, Search engines, Webometric tools

null / Use of citations and web links embedded in online teaching materials was studied for an undergraduate course. The undergraduate students enrolled in Geographic Information Science for Geography and Regional Development used web links more often than citations, but clearly did not see them as key to enhancing learning. Current conventions for citing and linking tend to make citations and links invisible. There is some evidence that citations and web links categorized and highlighted in terms of their importance and function to be served may help student learning in interdisciplinary domains. This is a preprint of the article published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 56 (4) February: 382-392.