Impact of DST-FIST Funding on Research Publications in India (2000-2020): A Bibliometric Investigation

The Department of Science and Technology-Funding for Improvement of Science and Technology (DST-FIST), the Government of India, is incessantly supporting the academic and research institutions to promote the research culture. The Government and specific funding agencies would like to know the impact of such research funding across various states, fields, disciplines, institutions, and researchers. The present study investigates the impact of DST-FIST funding on research publications in India through bibliometric analysis using the R programming and VOS viewer. Among the various other research outcomes, only research papers published during 2000-2020 by acknowledging the DST-FIST funding from the Web of Science database were considered for the present study. Regarding the impact of DST-FIST funding on research publications, we can draw reasonable conclusions based on bibliometric analysis. The investigation resulted in 7289 documents. The research collaboration worldwide is investigated with the help of explosion and growth patterns in scientific research outcomes. The most dominant document type is research articles, which accounted for 95.80% (6983). Research articles published under DST-FIST grants during 2000-2020 have received 76031 citations. The research publications in the field of Chemistry alone accounted for 47%, with 3437 articles. It implies that research in the chemistry domain (Crystallography, electrochemistry, polymer science, organic and inorganic, analytical, etc.) is the largest beneficiary of the DST-FIST funding scheme. The Annual Percentage Growth Rate in research publication was 25.6 %, and the compound annual growth rate for the period 2000-2020 is 45.94%. The Country Collaboration Network indicated that India collaborates with significant countries like the USA, Spain, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc. The maximum numbers of publication are in collaboration with the USA (227 publications), Spain (128 publications), Saudi Arabia (128 publications), and South Korea (121 publications). Overall, the study results projected a significant impact of research grants on the quality and quantity of research publications providing a wide-country collaboration network.


INTRODUCTION
Every country worldwide is putting its efforts to improve Science and Technology capability to achieve high performance and stay competitive. In developing countries like India, there is a strong focus on enhancing Science and Technology (S&T) and advanced research to develop and improve economic growth and knowledge creations. [1] Globally, the investment in S&T has received a renewed interest, as it provides a window of opportunity. In this regard, research policy has taken an essential role in every country's broader economic scene. S&T and advanced research will decide the pace of economic growth and development [2] results in greater prosperity. [3] The S&T policy's primary focus is to increase effectiveness and output in academic research. [4] In this regard, post-independence, the Indian government implemented many S&T policies. However, the investment concept in S&T and Research and Development (R&D) projects in India has less than a few decades of history, unlike in western countries. Globally, the investment in S&T has received a renewed interest as it provides a window of opportunities. The R&D expenditure across the world by different countries along with global share is as shown in Table 1.

Investment in S&T and R&D activities in India
The educational institutions are the knowledge creation and innovation centers. The Government of India has taken many initiatives to promote and nurture S&T activities in educational institutions. It will foster research rigor in the educational institutions thereby, strengthen the R&D capabilities. It is a well-known fact that S&T institutions in India have the forte to produce high-quality graduates by making a critical contribution to sustainable economic growth. [5] Journal of Scientometric Research, Vol 10, Issue 2, May-Aug 2021 Concerning this, in the year 2000, the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India, announced a new initiative titled "Fund for Improvement of S&T (FIST) to strengthen the infrastructure facilities in universities and higher educational institutions. Since 2000, the DST-FIST is funding institutions and research centers to produce and disseminate scientific knowledge. The funding support extends for five years for primary equipment purchase, networking, computational facilities, research infrastructure, new facilities, and equipment maintenance. Till 2012, the department has funded 96194.8 lakhs in INR. The financial assistance in the form of funds/grants will help educational institutions to develop adequate infrastructural facilities such as laboratory space, equipment, etc., crucial for S&T research in the institutions. [7] Many researchers have claimed that the funding will result in producing high-quality research outcomes. [8] Generally, the outcome of funding is a measure of the scientist's research activity in a specific time frame, including research publications in refereed, peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, book chapters, patents, the article in review, and essay letters, etc. Despite the magnitude of investment in S&T across the country, the value for money, i.e., the best possible results from investment in research, need to be estimated. [9] Every funding agency will have its operational framework to support the research policies. [10] These policies generally focus on promoting multiple research activities, [11] supporting collaboration for maintaining and improving its position in strategic/upcoming research areas. [12] Accordingly, researchers try to publish the outcome of scientific research to secure their precedence in discoveries [13] in return for the research funding. Apart from this, they also present their work in conferences, seminars and also patent them. The advancement of Information and Communication Tools has helped researchers collaborate and work on different interdisciplinary research themes. The thorough literature search using databases such as Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science revealed no bibliometric research studies published on the impact of DST-FIST funds on research publications in the Indian context. Therefore, the present study will establish first-hand data on this topic for future comparisons and for policymakers to allocate funds for S&T research with an emphasis on increasing the research rigor across the country.

Objectives of the study
Across the globe, researchers have analyzed and evaluated the impact of funding by government and other funding agencies. The present study aims to assess the impact of DST-FIST funding on research outcomes. The research objectives are as follows: • To examine the research output of India due to the DST-FIST scheme. Indian Government has implemented many initiatives to increase S&T capabilities through R&D programs and funded projects. Globally, the investment and public funding on S&T development have shown an increasing trend over the years, [6] which is true even in India. However, the total investment as a percentage of GDP, as a fraction of GDP, public expenditures on R&D in India is fixed between 0.6-0.7 percent of GDP over the last two decades. It is significantly less compared to other nations such as the United States (2.8), China (2.1), Israel (4.3), and Korea (4.2). In India's the R&D expenditure is dominated by public investment, and it lacks funding from private agencies. While, in other countries, the R&D investment made by private agencies is more than the Government funding.

DST-FIST Fund
The educational institutions have been the sources of knowledge creation and centers where a high volume of research activities are conducted. The outcome of such research activities results in innovative breakthroughs that can solve societal problems. It is necessary to strengthen the S&T infrastructure in the educational institutions to carry out quality research and innovative programs in interdisciplinary areas. Even though the Government has a strong linkage with various research centers across the country, perhaps the significant research base remains with academia. Therefore, the research contribution by educational institutions cannot be ignored, and it needs to be supported by Government agencies.
• To measure the publication trend in various research subject categories.
• To identify the top performed institutions.
• To classify the top authors based on citations and research quality.

METHODOLOGY AND DATA COLLECTION
Evaluating and estimating the impact of funding on research publications and other results is a complex issue. [14] Due to an assortment in research output, one may consider multiple indicators of research activities. [15] Many scholars have used different quantitative and qualitative approaches to evaluate the impact of funding, stimulating the research outcomes in specific fields through publication analysis. A Bibliometric study is a more objective and reliable analysis [16] used extensively by many researchers in different disciplines, as it involves numerous and diversified studies. [17] The bibliometric analysis provides insights on publication trends over time, research themes, the shift in research domain/discipline, the most dominant authors and institutions, and presents the bigger picture of extant research. [18] Such information is necessary to track and explore the research publication trends and their quality and quantity. For this purpose, the present study uses bibliometric and structured network analysis. The data is analyzed in two stages, namely, descriptive analysis and network extraction. Various approaches are used to develop and generate bibliometric networks using different units shown in Table 2.
In the bibliometric study, the first step is to select the database from which the relevant documents need to be collected. In the present study, Web of Science was used to achieve the stated research objectives. The present study covers the research publications published from 2000 to 2020, acknowledging the DST-FIST funding agency. Using the "DST-FIST," DST_FIST, DST-FIST as keywords in the title and affiliation section of the Web of Science (WOS) Core Collection database, the research articles are retrieved. According to the regulations of funding organizations, the grant number and name of the funding organization are mandatory to acknowledge in the research article. [19][20][21] This helped us retrieve the data by selecting the "Department of Science and Technology-Fund for Improvement in Science and Technology" in the funding agency category. The snapshot of the WOS database indicating the DST-FIST as a funding agency, as shown in the Figure 1.
The data were retrieved from the WOS database on February 8, 2020. The search yielded 7289 research articles/documents and was downloaded in "Tab-delimited" and "Bibtex" format, and it was imported to the "Bibliometrics" package in R programming. Further, the VOS viewer is used for network  visualization of journals, publications, keywords, and authors. The retrieved data was checked for duplications using R programming and validated for accuracy. To validate the accuracy of the extracted database, a data frame "FX-Funding text and FU-funding agency along with project code" retrieved from R programming was examined using a sampling test and obtained accurate results, as shown in Table 3.

ANALYSIS AND RESULTS
Bibliometric offers explicit awareness regarding core research themes with the highest productivity in a domain by identifying influential and leading researchers, publication sources, and author affiliation along with citation index. [18] Further, the co-citation-based network analysis will help determine various research domains, and bibliographic coupling helps to analyze the latest trends and variations in the knowledge network over the period. [22] The results derived from the R programming using bibliometric package indicate the features of the DST-FIST data obtained from the WOS database. This information is critical to understand the impact of DST-FIST funding on various research outcomes.

Visualization of data
In this method, knowledge from data is extracted to represent the same using intuitive visualization or maps such as social networks, dendrogram, or bi-dimensional maps. Visualization techniques represent different analyses and an overall science map to understand the relationship between the various knowledge domains. Using network analysis, statistical analyses are performed on the maps to measure the network's different statistical parameters and the relationships or the other clusters' overlapping. In this current study, a software visualization tool called "VOS viewer" is used to construct and visualize bibliometric networks. The network generation input is the raw data extracted from the Web of Science Database in the "Tab-delimited" format. The VOS-Viewer software provides insights on co-citations, bibliographic coupling, and co-occurrences of the most often cited authors, papers, keywords co-occurrence, etc.

R Package for Bibliometrics
The R Package' bibliometrix' was streamed on the raw data to gain insights about the FIST publications and their corelation, and the results extracted, accordingly. The extracted documents are indicated in Table 4.
A total of 7289 documents were extracted, which met the study criteria. The extracted database had ten different types of documents and their corresponding frequencies. The most dominant document type is research articles, which accounted for 95.80% (6983), 145 review articles accounting for 1.99%, 79 proceedings accounting for 1.08%, 65 early access articles accounting for 0.89%, etc.

Disciplinary distribution of publications across the academic subjects
The disciplinary distribution of various publications across the academic subjects tabulated and presented below. The research areas coded from 1-55 numbers based on academic matters. The proportion of each discipline is shown in Figure 2.
The technological breakthroughs witnessed in the last century in various sectors like healthcare, agro, manufacturing, life sciences, energy, environment, and food are mainly reliant on progress in the chemical sciences domain. [23] The research in the chemistry domain contributes to several other multidisciplinary research areas. It helps to solve the socioeconomic challenges faced by society and to improve the quality of life. It is evident from Figure 2 the research area "Chemistry" tops the Table with 3437 publications accounting for 47% of the total FIST acknowledged publications. It implies that research in the multiple areas (Crystallography, electrochemistry, polymer science, organic and inorganic, analytical, and other) of chemistry is the largest beneficiary of the DST-FIST funding scheme. Next was Biological Sciences with 910 publications (accounting for 12% of the total  publications) and Materials engineering with 738 publications (accounting for 10% of the overall publications). Further, from the midterm review report of DST, it was evident that the chemical sciences domain has topped the list (http://www. fist-dst.org/html-flies/majordepartmentprofile.html).

Impact of DST-FIST funding scheme on Volume and Quality of Research
The impact of research funding is generally measured using research publications, international collaborations, number of citations, patents, technology commercialization, and others. [24] To obtain detailed information on the impact of DST-FIST funding in the chemistry domain, we collected data on the different research outcomes, national and international collaboration, citation data, and others before and after FIST from the 364 DST-FIST funded institutions over twenty years (2000-2020). Table 5 presents the status of research work in the chemistry domain before and after DST-FIST funding.
From Further to know the overall trend of research activities and quality, the data on intramural grants, extramural grants, patents filed, technology commercialization, product and process developments, publications, the trend in impact factor, citation trend, consultancy, and other outreach activities were collected from the DST-FIST funding institutions. The data was collected using 5 points Likert's Scale, and responses are tabulated in Table 6. From

Biblio-Analysis Function in R
The "Biblio-Analysis" function in R generates the descriptive information of bibliometric data through summary and plots. The outcome of this function on the Web of Science database is represented in the following table. Table 7 represents the descriptive bibliographic data extracted from the Web of Science Database using a bibliometric      Annual Percentage Growth Rate (APGR) and Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) From the above Table 8: the APGR of DST-FIST publications for the period 2000-2019 was 25.6 %. Typically, the growth

Explosion in research publications and citations with the support of DST FIST Grants
In the last two decades, many scientific journals are published by acknowledging DST FIST funding. Figure 4 represents publications and citations covering all areas of science and engineering.
From Figure 4a, it is evident that there is an increasing trend in research publications. There is a tremendous increase in the number of citations over the years. The highest number of citations was in the year 2014, with 10759 Citations. From 2015 onwards, there is a gradual decrease in citations. There might be several reasons for decreasing trend in publications. According to Price's Law of scientific research model, any research theme intends to follow the precursor phase, where few researchers start publishing articles on the new research area. In the exponential growth phase, the research area gains more publicity as many researchers publish articles on the new theme; this is followed by a consolidation stage during which the studies on the research theme will become stagnant or iterative over the period and from then on the research on towards scientific development (International Comparative Performance of India's Scientific Research, 2012). The country collaboration network is shown in Figure 6. The distribution of color in the network represents the diversity of research. The size of the node represents the influential parameter of the countries. i.e., the bigger the size of nodes, the most significant is the country. The link strength between them can visualize the relationships among institutes of different countries. The cooperation level between the countries is represented by the distance between the countries and the link strength. i.e., the lesser the distance, the more cooperative are the countries in research. Similarly, the stronger the links, the stronger is the research collaboration between the institutes.
From the above network, it is evident that India is collaborating with countries like the USA, Spain, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc. Table 9 shows that the countries with which Indian researchers work in DST FIST departments collaborate and publish research articles. The maximum numbers of publications are that theme slowly decreases. [25,26] Relating the Price law for the downward trend in citations, it can be said that the research areas have reached the stage of stagnation or maturity. However, the research themes still had the potential to grow in collaboration with new research domains and gained prominence. Further, to explore the shift in citation trend, domain analysis was conducted, and the results are shown in Figure 5. The domain analysis was performed using the "Research Area-SC" category of the WOS database using the R program for 8 years (2012-2020). The WOS categories are coded from 1-55 in par with the academic subjects for the analysis purpose.
The domain analysis highlights the advent of new domains such as Energy Science, Mechanical Engineering, Telecommunication Engineering, Computer Science Engineering, Water Resources, Metallurgical Engineering, etc., after 2014, as shown in Figure 5.

Country Collaboration Analysis
The country collaboration network reflects the degree of communication between countries and their active research

Top Ten Cited Countries
By acknowledging the DST FIST funding, around 7289 publications (only in WOS) have received 76031 citations. Table 10 provides details on the name of the country, the number of Citations, and the average article citations.

Institute Co-Authorship Analysis
Many projects need collaborative strength for the accomplishment of research work. Co-authorship analysis is a measure of the level of research collaboration, and it is an index to assess the status of research in a specific field. Institute co-authorship analysis is presented to visualize the extent of author involvement from various academic institutions.    It is evident from Table 13 that Gosh A of the University of Calcutta has got the highest number of articles (124) by acknowledging DST-FIST funding, followed by Das S with 105 articles; and also the articles fractionalized. The article fractionalized indicates that if there are three authors associated with a single research article, each author is assigned a credit of 0.33 articles instead of one. [28] Professor Gosh A has the highest number of publications with a fractional credit of 32.5 articles. Further, from the above Table, it is evident that highquality publications are from the northeast region.

Citation analysis: h-index
The authors' h-index is an author-level metric that attempts to evaluate a scientist's research publications' citation impact and their respective productivity. [29] The index is based on the most cited papers and citations received in other publications.

Top ten most frequent journals
The top journals will provide prominent recognition to the authors and their affiliated institutes or universities by giving global credit for the work published.

Top ten productive authors
The most productive author/ researcher in a field helps identify the researcher who has individually contributed to the evolution and growth of research. [27] Identifying such pioneers in a particular research domain will help other budding researchers in that domain to approach them for a higher quantum of research, conduct multidisciplinary research and collaborations to achieve fruitful results for societal development, and solve other related issues. Table 13 presents the topmost publishing authors who have significantly contributed to the evolution and growth of research in diversified areas.

Top Ten Cited/Influential Papers
The most productive authors provide information on individual contributions. It is essential to identify the topcited/influential articles to add new knowledge to the existing literature in a particular domain. Table 15 below lists the top 10 research publications along with their citations extracted from the WOS database. Table 15 shows the necessary information about the authors' name, area of research, source of publication, average publication, and publications. It is evident from the Table, Raut (311 citations) and Begum (299 citations) have made a significant contribution towards organic chemistry and structural chemistry, respectively, by their seminal work. Research contributions will provide a new direction to the existing theories by empirical validation by the systematic study. All these contributions will help to obtain the theoretical and methodical maturity in the respective areas of research and interdisciplinary recognition.

Top Ten Most Frequent Keywords
In this section, we visualize the usage of keywords by authors in the articles. This information provides an area of research exploration and the top 10 keywords acknowledging the DST FIST support as presented in the Table 16. The keyword co-occurrence network reveals the major discipline or field of study by providing additional support for further research. The size of the nodes and the words in the keyword cooccurrence network indicates the node weightage. i.e., the bigger the node and word, the more is the weightage. The distances between them can visualize the strength of the relation between two nodes. The shorter the distance, the stronger is the relation and vice versa. The lines between two words indicated the appearance of two terms in the same article. The thicker the lines, the more are the co-occurrence. The same color belongs to the same cluster. The VOS viewer grouped author is included in this collection (database) has been cited by other local authors.

CONCLUSION
The present bibliometric study was conducted to evaluate the DST-FIST scheme's impact on scientific research publication growth. The data was extracted in WOS and used VOS viewer for visualization of bibliometric networks. This study consolidates bibliometric analysis and visualization of publications acknowledging the DST-FIST scheme/program. The study can identify several prominent researchers, their specific field of study, country collaboration, and publication sources in various research domains. This study also revealed interesting information regarding authors who have published the maximum number of papers, preferred sources of publication, most cited references, top ten authors, keywords, etc. Some exciting results covering DST-FIST acknowledged publications are summarized as follows: The the keywords into 11 different clusters, as shown in the below Figure 8.
The Keyword co-occurrence network using VOS viewer resulted in 11 different clusters, of which four clusters are predominantly visible from the above Figure 8. The cluster has the keyword "oxidative stress," which has the highest frequency of 114, and it is represented by red color in Figure 8. The other clusters, like crystal structure (110), x-ray diffraction (110), and cytotoxicity (91), are represented in yellow, green, and blue clusters, respectively. The link strength between two nodes refers to the co-occurrence frequency of keywords, and it means a quantitative index relationship between two nodes. These are all the nodes whose link strength is more than 10.

Top 10 Local Citations
The local citation analysis [Local citation implies citation by Indian Authors] refers to the local author's quality of research publications by the number of citations. In other words, it refers to the number of times other researchers cited the local author's research works. It also measures how many times an  analysis refers to the citing of two publications of the same author reflected in other articles. The co-citation network analysis revealed 11 clusters of publications that are frequently cited together. An author-based bibliographic network yielded 24 clusters and revealed information about linkages and grouping various authors' research works. Further, the analysis provides an understanding of the changes occurring over time and the trends in author-based knowledge networks.
From this, it can be concluded that DST-FIST support for science and technology infrastructure has been a boon and a motivational factor for researchers and academicians to involve them in active research and make significant contributions in diversified research areas. Such studies provide in-depth insights for policymakers on key research areas, the impact of research funding, output indicators, and recognize the potential areas for future funding. These output indicators can be further differentiated between Government and non-government institutions and study the relative strengths and weaknesses to perform better with government bodies' assistance.

LIMITATION AND FUTURE WORK
This study focused on the only DST-FIST funding from 2000-2019. As this infrastructural funding focused on the Indian academic higher education institutions, this may shed light only in India at the higher education level. Further research could be considered, at the discipline level, to compare the different disciplines and their outcome for various schemes, funding agencies. The present study has considered only WOS indexed publications, not other publications indexed in other databases such as Scopus, Google, etc. The present study also not focused on the patents and different research outcomes; this could be considered for further research. Lastly, an in-depth analysis of the relations between the amount spent on S&T and diverse research output from an economic perspective would be suggested.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Domain Analysis
A disciplinary distribution study revealed the focus areas of research publications acknowledging DST-FIST. It is quite evident that 47% of the total publications favoured to "Chemistry" domain, followed by "Biological Sciences (12%)", "Materials Engineering (10%)", "Physics (5%)," etc. The findings revealed that the publications from necessary science departments have a higher degree of research articles; incidentally, these domains' funding is also ranked number one.
Collaborative research work: Concerning collaborative research work, India has a collaboration network among countries like the USA, Spain, England, Russia, France, Singapore, South Korea, etc. In terms of institutions, the Indian Institute of Technology has the highest number of publications and citations, followed by the University of Calcutta. It implies that the Indian Institute of Technology is effectively utilizing FIST funds for quality research publications.
Citations: The most common analysis in the bibliometric study is citation analysis. It measures the importance of publication work by counting the number of times cited by other authors. It also indicates the relevance of the research area. Concerning the number of citations, the trend graph revealed a positive growth up to 2014; it gradually took a decreasing trend after 2015 onwards. To identify the downward shift in citations, a domain analysis was carried out, which revealed that there was diversification in domain areas; for example, Materials was a part of basic science, later it emerged as a new research domain. The probable reason for the decreasing trend is assumed to be progressive changes in the research domain, the other factors like quality of the research paper, minimum time to gain the citations, obsolescence of research area, etc. The Journal Royal Society of Chemistry ranks first among top journals in which most research papers are published. It clearly shows that most of the articles published acknowledging DST-FIST support were published in Tier 1 journals, which indeed talks about the quality of scientific research across various Nation institutions.
In the analysis of keywords, we have found that more focus is on chemistry in the research area of "oxidative stress" followed by "crystal structure" and "X-ray diffraction," etc. The keyword co-occurrence network gave insights regarding the main research themes across various institutions in India.
Author: It is essential to study the most influential/productive authors, and their affiliations and author-based analysis were carried out. The findings revealed that Ghosh A of the University of Calcutta, department of organic chemistry, is the most influential author with 124 articles published acknowledging DST-FIST. An article fractionalized count of 32.5 and h-index of 27. And also, Ghosh A has topped the local citations Table with a count of 464 citations. Co-citation