Research & Development in India
The University Grants Commission has taken note of several past instances of Indians resorting to publishing their research work by unethical methods and has decided to take strong steps and impose stiff penalties to deter such activities.
What has happened?
- Unfortunately, Indian authors are among those who have the most number of their papers retracted. These papers are retracted due to unethical practices on part of the authors like plagiarism, data manipulation & fabrication and randomization of results.
- Indians have also been found to publish most of their research in predatory journals which charge a high amount of money to publish substandard research work.
Why publishing is necessary?
- Publication (in journals/conference proceedings) of research work is a mandatory requirement for award of doctoral degrees.
- It is also used as a metric in faculty equalization (API) under the overall academic score.
- The number of people taking admission into PhD programs has nearly doubled between 2010 and 2017, thus publication space is shrinking and research work has become overstretched.
What UGC plans?
- A specially constituted UGC committee has recommended new and stern measures which aim to preserve academic ethics and deter plagiarism by the researchers.
- It has also decided to recommend to the government to make it stop considering all publications which are in predatory journals or presentations in predatory conferences for faculty evaluation.
- These faculty evaluation results are used for the generation of academic credit and are an important metric for selection to teaching positions, confirmation, promotion, appraisals, the award of scholarships or academic degrees or credits in any form.
- The UGC plans to use only the research publications only the journals listed in the CARE Reference List of Quality Journals.
