Update : Research in India

While the Indian Government is keen to invest heavily in improving the Research facilities and outlook in the country, international research watch-dogs have alleged major concerns with the research work being published by Indian scholars and senior authors.

What is happening?

Several premier Indian research institutions like the IISc Bangalore, Indian School of Mines (now IIT Dhanbad), Indian Institute of Toxicology Research (IITR) Lucknow and CSIR-Institutes have had their research work flagged by independent researchers and watch-dogs for presenting inaccurate results, manipulating data and presenting illegal findings.

This has prompted an outcry in the International research community and called for the retraction of the presented results. This also leads to the loss of credibility of Indian Researchers and facilities before the world.

What can be done?

The Indian Institutes need to have stringent norms to ensure that such research does not get published without following the due procedure and checks. While some research issues can be attributed to minor oversight and error in judgment, the majority of the flagged research is performed with an intent to obtain higher publications and improve their API. Such researchers must be penalized.

PubPeer

Pubpeer is online research forum that allows independent scientists to publish a post-publication review of scientific papers and comment on their scientific validity. Most of the problematic research has been flagged by researchers on the Pubpeer website.