India has a history of scientific research and publications. Currently, there are debates going in online forum, meetings by scientist, researchers, academician on the aspects of scientific research, publications and its progression. Scientific development and publications is directly playing a vital role in the development of country in terms of healthcare, education, economy, and employment stability so on.

It will also help an individual to improve their quality of research, to get promotion on their position, to establish international and national collaboration, and they will be recognized in the society. Apart from this there are several factors influences on scientific research, which are depending on the country status, population of the country, availability of resources. Being a developing country, India ranks number two in world population (1,329 million) and having steady growth rate, they are very close to Chinese population (1,378 million) and far ahead of United States (324 millions) population.

Considering the above fact, publications, patent production in India were marginally low as compare to other developing and developed country. In the year 2015 India ranked number 5 in the production of publication, USA, China, United Kingdom, and Germany are in leading position. Interesting fact is that in India out of 10,000 labour force only 4 being researcher, India ranks below Kenya, Chile, Brazil, and China. Investment on R&D in India is very poor, which is only 0.9% of its GDP, where as China, Russia, and Brazil spending more on R&D than India.

How much money India spends on each researcher?

India spends more or less same amount of money per researchers as many other countries do.

How to improve scientific research and publication quality?

• Stringent review process is essential for grant proposal in funding agencies
• Requirement of more funds from government agencies and industries
• Need for more collaboration within the universities, institutes and with industries
• Each institute or university should have research and publication internal committee review board for better output
• Researcher or scientist should have good command over English language to convince reviewer in the process of publication or in grant proposal writing stage
• Government and industry should support for product-based funding
• Need for an improvement of Indian-origin journals and their publishers
• Need to avoid splitting off of the study content to make more publications in lower impact factor journals
• Mandatory minimum publication requirement at academic setup for the upgradation of position
• Need to involve rigorous research activities at colleges, universities
• Compulsory programme is essential on publication and research grant writing for researcher and scientist at each university and institutes
• Quality of the publications can be estimated by their citation index, currently India is lagging behind citation index as compared to other leading countries.

– Dr Prabhakar Puttachandra