Research as if relevance mattered : medical research in India as reflected by SCI 1981-85

I attempt to look at medical research in India as reflected by the literature with a view to seeing if research priorities match the country's needs. The limited information available indicates that Indians suffer most from diarrhoeal diseases, respiratory diseases, circulatory system diseases, infectious diseases, infancy diseases, malaria and tuberculosis. From journals most often used by Indian medical researchers, they seem to be most active in tropical medicine (third in the world after the USA and UK), andrology (second only to the USA), general and internal medicine (eleventh), and radiology and nuclear medicine (eleventh). Overall India's share in the journal literature of medicine is far less than her share of the literatures of all of science (including engineering and medicine), physical sciences, mathematics, chemistry and engineering. Indian researchers have published ten or more papers in only about 100 medical journals, many of them low-impact journals, as seen from Science Citation Index, in the five years 1981-85. To see India's performance in perspective, I have compared the share of India in more than twenty subfields of medicine and a few related areas with that of some advanced countries and some middle-level countries whose scientific enterprises are comparable to hers. India, I conclude, could be more purposive in her research priorities and probably should invest much more in medical research.