Whither Scientometrics in India

Use of scientific literature for comparing scientific activity has a long history and dates back to 1917 in which Coles and Eales[1] analyzed publications in comparative anatomy published between 1543 and 1860 by simply counting the number of titles, both books and journal articles, and grouping them by country. In 1923, Hulme[2] published an analysis of the international catalogue of scientific literature for the years 1901 through 1913. Following the above works Gross and Gross[3] took the next step in the analysis of scientific literature in 1927 when they tabulated citations for the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Before the introduction of Science Citation Index (SCI) in 1963, the main source for undertaking bibliometric assessments were subject abstracts in different disciplines like Chemical Abstracts in Chemistry, Physics Abstracts in Physics, Engineering Index for Engineering and Mathematical Reviews for Mathematics etc. India also started publishing Indian Science Abstracts as early as in 1965. Earlier, all these abstracting services were published as hard copies. Later their CD-ROM versions started publishing and now all these services are available online as databases through the internet.