Mobile Research in India : A Scientometric Assessment of Publications Output during 2007-16

Abstract

The paper examines 13021 Indian publications on mobile research during 2007-16,as covered in Scopus database. The Indian publications were downloaded using a search strategy which uses the search term ‘mobile*’ in the two tags, namely ‘keyword tag’ and ‘Article Title tag’ and restricting it to the India in ‘country tag’ and period 2007-16 in ‘date range tag’. The Indian mobile research output experiencing an annual average growth rate of 22.64 per cent, global share of 5.88 per cent, citation impact of 2.11 and international collaborative publication share of 11.28 per cent during 2007-16. Computer Science, among subjects, contributed the largest publication share (74.61), engineering (38.32%), mathematics and social sciences (6.94% and 6.54), etc. during 2007-16. Amongst14 subfields identified in India’s mobile research, mobile networks contributed the largest publication share (53.19%), followed by mobile telecommunication systems (35.09%), Mobile communication (29.22%), mobile ad hoc networks (26.86%), mobile security (20.62%), etc. The most productive 20 Indian organisations and authors together contributed 25.64 per cent and 5.11 per cent share to the overall publications output of India in mobile research during 2007-16.The top 20 journals contributed 23.0 per cent share to the Indian journal output during 2007-16. Only 14 publications have registered citations from 109 to 548 and these together received3259 citations, with 232.79 citations per paper. Conclude that India is still not a leading country in the world on mobile research both in terms of quantity and quality of research. In view of strategic and global importance and to increase the research output and quality, the Indian Government needs to identify this area as one of the national priority area, involving much larger R&D investments and trained manpower and also increase international collaboration with leading mobile research hubs.