Contribution and Citation Impact of Eight New IITs : A Scientometric Assessment of their Publications during 2010-14

This paper analyzes 3656 research publications of the eight new Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) as covered in Scopus International database covering the period 2010-14 with the purpose to understand their comparative performance in research. The findings reveal that publications of eight new IITs increased at an annual average rate of 68.78% and registered an average citation impact per paper of 4.63. About 35.39% and 28.34% publications of eight new IITs resulted from national and international collaboration respectively during 2010-14. The major areas of research across eight new IITs were engineering, physics & astronomy, computer science, materials science and chemistry, constituting institutional publication share of 34.85%, 27.05%, 25.16%, 22.16% and 18.90% in their total output during 2010-14. Mathematics, chemical engineering, energy, biochemistry, genetics & molecular biology, social sciences and medicine constituted as the 6 medium productive subject areas of new IITs with institutional share of 11.41%, 9.05%, 6.35%, 6.18%, 5.44% and 4.68% during 2010-14. Thirty five (35) significant authors across eight new IITs together accounted for 41.68% share in the total output of IITs during 2010-14. About 26 high cited papers were published by these eight new IITs, which received 50 and above citations per paper in five years. Amongst these 26 papers, 17 received 50 to 99 citations and 9 other 100-226 citations per paper.Twenty six highly cited papers (17 papers in citation range 50-99 and 9 papers in citation range 100 to 276) together received 2392 citations, registering an average citation per paper of 92.0.


INTRODUCTION
The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are branded as world class autonomous institutes and comes under the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD), Government of India.IITs are established as per the Institutes of Technology Act of India, 1961 and they have declared as "institutions of national importance".The have started 6-7 years back, their research output is very promising.

Literature Review
There are only few papers analyzing the performance of IITs and other such group of institutions in the past.Prathap 1 benchmarked the recent research performance of the IITs in academic research in the area of engineering science and technology in the country against that of similarly placed institutions in the world using bibliometric indicators from the Web of Science and Scopus databases.Solanki, Uddin and Singh 2 measured the research competitiveness of Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) through a scientometric analysis of their research output during the last five years .The research output indexed in Web of Science of the five recently established IISERs has been obtained and analysed computationally to identify growth trends, per capita output, authorship and collaboration patterns, citation impact, average citation per paper, etc.The research performance of IISERs is also compared with the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Technology system to obtain an assessment of their research potential.Bala and Kumari 3 study analysed the research performance of National Institutes of Technology (NITs) of India during 2001-2010 on several parameters including NITs overall contribution, its growth pattern, citation impact, the share of international collaboration, identification of significant participating countries in NITs international collaboration, contribution and impact by different subject areas, identification of weak and strong subject areas, productivity and impact of prolific authors, pattern of communication of NITs output in most productive journals and characteristics of high cited papers of NITs.Prathap and Gupta 4 presented a ranking of research performance of 67 Indian engineering and technological institutes using data from Scopus international bibliographical database, using a recently introduced p-index, which can serve as a composite indicator that combines quality with quantity.

Objectives of the Study
The main objectives of the present study are to analyze the broad characteristic features of the publications output of eight New IITs during 2010-14, using quantitative and qualitative indicators.In particular the study focuses on the following aspects: (i) To study the growth and citation impact of its research output; (ii) To study the research output and citation impact under and narrow broad subject areas; (iii) To analyse its national and international collaboration; (iv) To study the media of communication and characterstics of its high cited papers.

Methodology
Using affliation search, Indian Institute of Technology was searched and it resulted in listing of all 16 IITs.Each new IIT was selected one by one and its search was restricted to years 2010-14 under "year tag".Using this search strategy string (shown below), the publication data was further analysed using the tags of "authorship", "subject area", "document type", "source type", "source title", "keywords", "affiliation" and "country/territory" for information on collaborative countries and publications, source journals, most productive authors, etc.Similar exercise was undertaken for all the eight new IITs.In the last the publication data of all eight new IITs was combined.For impact factor, SJR data has been used.A number of quantitative and qualitative indicators have been used here to study the performance of IITs.AF-ID ( "Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad" 60103917 ) OR AF-ID ( "Indian Institute of Technology Indore" 60104350 ) OR AF-ID ( "Indian Institute of Technology Patna" 60104342 ) OR AF-ID ( "Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar" 60104339) OR AF-ID ( "Indian Institute of Technology Ropar" 60103918 ) OR AF-ID ( "Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar" 60104341 ) OR AF-ID ( "Indian Institute of Technology Mandi" 60104340 ) OR AF-ID ( "Indian Institute of Technology Rajasthan" 60104343 )

National Collaborative Publications
The national collaborative output of 8 new IITs consists of 1301 publications (Table 4-5), which constituted 35.59% share of its total output during 2010-14.The share of national collaborative output of individual eight new IITshowever varied from 24.96% (IIT-Indore) to 52.02% (IIT-Jodhpur) during 2010-14.

International Collaboration
The number of international collaborative publications of eight new IITs consisted of 1036 publications (Table 6-7), which constituted 28.34% share of its total output during 2010-14.The individual share of international collaborative publications of eight new IITs varied from 14.06% to 41.60% during 2010-14.The international collaborative linkages of new IITs with different countries are shown in Table 8.

Subject-Wise Distribution of Publications
The broad subject-wise distribution of output of 8 New IITs are shown in Table 9.The subject-wise output is discussed under: (i) major productive subject areas; (ii) medium productive subject areas and (i) least productive subject areas.

Most Productive Subject Areas
Engineering, physics & astronomy, computer science, materials science and Chemistry are the five most productive subject areas of new IITs, with publication share of 34.85%, 27.05%, 25.16%, 22.16% and18.90% to the total output of new IITs during 2010-14.Chemistry registered the highest citation per paper (8.30) among these five subject areas, followed by physics & astronomy (6.11), materials science (5.35), engineering (3.49) and computer science (1.92) during 2010-14.

High Productivity Authors
The productivity of top 35 most productive authors, from across 8 new IITs, varied from 21 to 82 papers

Medium of Communication
The eight new IITs scholars had contributed 660 papers, published them in top 35 most productive journals as shown in Table 24.These 660 papers constituted 16.41% share of New IITs total output during 2010-14.Most of these reporting journals had high impact factor with SJR varying from 0.41 to 4.40.New IITs published the largest number of their papers (70) in RSC Advances, Tetrahedron Letters (44 papers), Dalton Transactions (40 papers), etc.The distribution of papers in these top 35 journals by individual IITs is also shown in Table 24.

Table 11 : Scientometric Profile of Physics Research in New IITs during 2010-14
TP=Total Papers; TC=Total Citations; ACPP=Average Citations Per Paper; HI-h-index; ICP=International Collaborative Publications

Table 10 : Scientometric Profile of Engineering Research in New IITs during 2010-14
TP=Total Papers; TC=Total Citations; ACPP=Average Citations Per Paper; HI-h-index; ICP=International Collaborative Publications

Table 9 : Broad Subject-Wise Distribution of 8 New IITs Output during 2010-14
TP=Total Papers; TC=Total Citations; ACPP=Average Citations Per Paper; HI-h-index; HCP=High Cited papers (receiving 100 or more citations); NCP=National Collaborative Publications and ICP=International Collaborative Publications'

Table 13 : Scientometric Profile of Materials Science Research in New IITs during 2010-14
TP=Total Papers; TC=Total Citations; ACPP=Average Citations Per Paper; HI-h-index; ICP=International Collaborative Publications

Table 14 : Scientometric Profile of Chemistry Research in New IITs during 2010-14
TP=Total Papers; TC=Total Citations; ACPP=Average Citations Per Paper; HI-h-index; ICP=International Collaborative Publications

Table 15 : Scientometric Profile of Mathematics Research in New IITs during 2010-14
TP=Total Papers; TC=Total Citations; ACPP=Average Citations Per Paper; HI-h-index; ICP=International Collaborative Publications

Table 20 : Scientometric Profile of Medicine in New IITs during 2010-14
TP=Total Papers; TC=Total Citations; ACPP=Average Citations Per Paper; HI-h-index; ICP=International Collaborative Publications

Table 22 : Scientometric Profile of Earth & Planetary Sciences in New IITs during 2010-14
TP=Total Papers; TC=Total Citations; ACPP=Average Citations Per Paper; HI-h-index; ICP=International Collaborative Publications