Scientometric profile of Indian science as seen through Science Citation Index

An analysis of 11067 papers published by Indian scientists and indexed by Scie/lce Citatio/l!Ili!ex (SCI) CD-ROM for the year 1997 indicates that academic institutions (universities and colleges) are the major contributors to the scientific publications output. Major contribution came from 29 institutions, which contributed about 45% of the total Indian scientific output. Based on the values of different impact indicators (normalized impact per paper, publication effective index and relative quality index) TIFR outperforms all other institutions on different impact indicators. Fifty seven percent of the output is concentrated in physical sciences, chemical and medical sciences. Indian scientists widely publish their findings in journals published from the scientifically advanced countries of the West. Based on these values of the Normalized Impact Factor (NIF), it is observed that about two-third of the total papers have appeared in low and medium NIF journals.