Contribution and Citation Impact of Eight New IITs: A Scientometric Assessment of their Publications during 2010-14

This paper analyzes 3656 research publications of the eight new Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) as covered in Scopus International database covering the period 2010-14 with the purpose to understand their comparative performance in research. The findings reveal that publications of eight new IITs increased at an annual average rate of 68.78% and registered an average citation impact per paper of 4.63. About 35.39% and 28.34% publications of eight new IITs resulted from national and international collaboration respectively during 2010-14. The major areas of research across eight new IITs were engineering, physics & astronomy, computer science, materials science and chemistry, constituting institutional publication share of 34.85%, 27.05%, 25.16%, 22.16% and 18.90% in their total output during 2010-14. Mathematics, chemical engineering, energy, biochemistry, genetics & molecular biology, social sciences and medicine constituted as the 6 medium productive subject areas of new IITs with institutional share of 11.41%, 9.05%, 6.35%, 6.18%, 5.44% and 4.68% during 2010-14. Thirty five (35) significant authors across eight new IITs together accounted for 41.68% share in the total output of IITs during 2010-14. About 26 high cited papers were published by these eight new IITs, which received 50 and above citations per paper in five years. Amongst these 26 papers, 17 received 50 to 99 citations and 9 other 100-226 citations per paper.Twenty six highly cited papers (17 papers in citation range 50-99 and 9 papers in citation range 100 to 276) together received 2392 citations, registering an average citation per paper of 92.0.