Current Science

Sumit Kumar Banshal ¹, Vivek Kumar Singh ², Pranab K. Muhuri ¹, Philipp Mayr ³

Affiliations
1 Department of Computer Science, South Asian University, New Delhi 110 021,, IN
2 Department of Computer Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi 221 005, IN
3 GESIS Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences, Cologne, DE

Abstract

Scholarly articles are now increasingly being mentioned and discussed in social media platforms, sometimes even as pre- or post-print version uploads. Measures of social media mentions and coverage are now emerging as an alternative indicator of impact of scholarly articles. This article aims to explore how much scholarly research output from India is covered in different social media platforms, and how similar or different it is from the world average. It also analyses the disciplinewise variations in coverage and altmetric attention for Indian research output, including a comparison with the world average. Results obtained show interesting patterns. Only 28.5% of the total research output from India is covered in social media platforms, which is about 18% less than the world average. ResearchGate and Mendeley are the most popular social media platforms in India for scholarly article coverage. In terms of discipline-wise variation, medical sciences and biological sciences have relatively higher coverage across different platforms compared to disciplines like information science and engineering.

Keywords

Disciplinary Variation, Research Output, Scholarly Articles, Social Media.

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Sumit Kumar Banshal ¹, Vivek Kumar Singh ², Philipp Mayr ³

Affiliations
1 Department of Computer Science, South Asian University, New Delhi 110 021, IN
2 Department of Computer Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi 221 005, IN
3 GESIS Leibniz Institute of Social Sciences, Cologne, DE

Abstract

During the last two decades the number of private universities in India has increased significantly. According to AISHE report of 2016, out of 799 universities in India, 277 are private universities, i.e. one out of every three universities in India is a private university. A significant proportion of colleges (about 78%) are also privately managed, as they do not contribute much to research activities and hence are not included in this analysis. Private universities are now becoming a major component of the Indian higher education system. Some of the private universities are exclusively positioning and projecting themselves as universities for high quality research and innovation. A few of them are now well placed in the national-level NIRF ranking framework. It is in this context that this paper presents a comparative account of research performance of the 25 most productive private universities with the set of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Central Universities (CUs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs), all of which have a well-established environment and culture of research. A set-based comparison methodology is followed. The results show good performance of private universities in research, especially in terms of output and rate of growth of output. However, on quality and productivity per capita and per rupee spent, they have a long way to go to match the performance levels of well-established centrally funded higher education institutions of India. This study presents detailed scientometric assessment of some most productive private universities in India.

Keywords

Private Universities, Research Performance, Research in India, Research Policy.

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