Highly Cited Publications Output by India in Computer Science 1996-2015: A Scientometric Assessment

The study identified highly cited papers in India’s computer science research during 1996-2015 and analyzed their publication and citation distributions to understand what role contributing authors, research organizations as well as international collaborative countries have played in Indian computer science research. Highly cited paper were defined as papers that received at least 100 citations since publication. Based on this criteria, it was found that India published a total of 406 highly cited articles in computer science, constituting 0.32% world share during 1996-15. In recent years, top-cited articles have reached their citation peak in the early years of their citation life cycle, but have shown a more-rapid decreasing trend compared to top-cited articles from past decades. These 406 highly articles have an average citation per paper of around 258. The institutional distribution was highly skewed with only a few reputed institutions contributing to highly cited papers. International collaboration mainly happened with the USA. One observes from this study that India’s productivity of highly cited papers in computer scienceby authors is abysmally low and theslow growth rate of high quality papers in computer science is a matter of concern. The article argues that challenge before the top leadership in science in the country is how to encourage team-based/multi-institutional collaborative research in order to produce and publish high quality and high impact research work in computer science.