India is world’s third largest producer of scientific articles: US Report

According to a latest report by US National Science Foundation (NSF), India has emerged as the world’s third largest publisher of science and engineering articles. As per the statistics compiled in report, China has topped the list followed by US.

Key Highlights of Report

China tops the list as it accounts for 20.67% of all global publications in scientific articles. In China, about 5,28,263 scientific articles were published in 2018. As per the report, China’s rate of research output has grown almost twice as fast as world’s annual average for last 10 years, while the output of US and European Union (EU) has grown at less than half world’s annual growth rate.

United States: follows China at second spot with about 4,22,808 global publications in science and engineering articles in 2018.

India: emerged as world’s third largest publisher of science and engineering articles after China (5,28,263) and US (4,22,808) in 2018, with about 1,35,788 science and engineering articles were published in country. Even though India has a long way to go as compared to US and China in terms of number of scientific article publications, its emergence as third largest publisher is mainly due to a phenomenal double-digit growth rate in last one decade from 2008 to 2018.

Top Ten: Other countries which made it to top 10 list are Germany (1,04,396), Japan (98,793), United Kingdom (97,681), Russia (81,579), Italy (71,240), South Korea (66,376) and France (66,352).

Global Output: Both China and India have increased their share of the growing world output. China produced 5% of global output in 2000 and grew to 21% in 2018, while India’s share rose from 2% to 5%t during this period.

Even though research papers from US and European Union (EU) continue to have the most impact, but, China has shown a rapid increase in producing impactful publications, as measured by references to journal articles and conference papers.

As measured by journal articles and conference papers, the Specialisation in scientific fields differs among countries. It shows that US, EU and Japan are more specialised in health sciences while China and India more specialised in engineering.

Month: Current Affairs - December, 2019