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

The present study examined Indian output of 4402 papers in robotics research, as indexed in Scopus database during 2007-16, with a view to understand India’s growth rate, global share, citation impact, international collaborative papers share, distribution of publications by broad subjects, productivity and in addition discuss the citation profile of top organizations and authors, preferred communication media and characteristics of high cited papers. India registered 24.84% growth, 2.21% global publications share, 9.63% international collaborative publications share, and averaged 4.13 citations per paper during the period. Computer science was the most followed subject for robotics research with 67% publications share, followed by engineering (52.34%), mathematics (12.81%), etc. Top 50 productive organizations and authors belong to academic and R&D sectors and they accounted for 61.93% and 26.94% publications share and 70.54% and 35.48% citations share in Indian robotics research output. Top 25 most productive journals accounted for 41.38% share of 1566 journal papers published in robotics research by India. India contributed only 16 highly cited papers with 100 to 368 citations per paper.


INTRODUCTION
Robotics is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering and science that includes mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, and others.Robotics deals with the design, construction, operation, and use of robots, as well as computer systems for their control, sensory feedback, and information processing.This field overlaps with electronics, computer science, artificial intelligence, mechatronics, nanotechnology and bioengineering. [1]Robotics technology holds a significant promise for improving industrial automation and production lines, operating complex surgical procedures, performing space and security missions, and providing services to assist, educate and entertain humans. Robots can be autonomous or semi-autonomous.Today, robotics is a rapidly growing field, as technological advances continue; researching, designing, and building new robots serve various practical purposes, whether domestically, commercially, or militarily. [1]Robotics Technology will become dominant in the coming decade.It will influence every aspect of work and home.Robotics has the potential to transform lives and work practices, raise efficiency and safety levels, provide enhanced levels of service and create jobs.lobal investment in R&D in robotics research is growing at a fast rate.A number of countries, such as U.S., China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and European Union have incorporated national strategic initiatives in robotics, as a part of their national plans. [3]Europe leads in mobility for structured environments, including urban transportation.Europe also has significant programs in eldercare and home service robotics.Australia leads in commercial applications of field robotics, particularly in such areas as cargo handling and mining, as well as in the theory and application of localization and navigation. [4]e industry and military sectors were the earliest adopters of robotics technologies.Now the falling prices, faster CPUs, improved safety and easier programming have put robots within the reach of virtually every sector, and their ability to work side by side with human opens up an array of new applications.Industries as diverse as retail, healthcare, food processing, mining, transportation and agriculture may see radical robotics fueled changes in coming years.In 2016, the robotics field experienced a dramatic shift towards consumer focused applications. [5]dia is also witnessing a growing demand for robots in country for speed, safety, scale, and success in manufacturing, logistics, retail, healthcare, and defense sectors.Automotive industry, requires robots for example for car assembly, welding and painting jobs; warehouses require robots to help humans to sort, pick, and package items; healthcare requires robots primarily in the form of assistive and skill development technologies; and security sector requires robots to improve and strengthen surveillance systems such as border areas patrolling.Country also needs robots for searching and rescuing trapped humans during earthquakes.During 2004 -2011, India witnessed significant growth in robotics companies in the country.Top companies in India like Gray Orange, KUKA Robotics, Hi-Tech Robotics, Systemz, Gridbots, DiFACTO, and ASIMOV Robotics are providing solutions for robot simulation, offline programming, onsite robot programming, training, design services, robot calibration, and self-driving vehicles.Besides, they are broadening the horizon of what robotics is all about.Research and development efforts in robotics in India are still limited to select few educational and research institutes in the domain of higher education sector and R&D sector. [6]

Literature Review
Only few studies are available on bibliometric assessment of national and global robotics research.Amongst such studies, Vijayakumar and Annapurnar [7] analyzed BRICS countries research publications on robotics, determining their citation style, self-citation style, citing the articles, and self-citing the articles.Even an attempt is made to know the average citation per document and h index possessed by respective countries of BRICS research community.Ghias and Larivière [8] analyzed robotics-related scientific publications sourced from INSPEC database covering the period 1995-2009.They discussed the role of academia, governmental institutions and firms in robotics scientific activities, and identified the most prolific institutions involved in robotics research.Goeldnera, Herstatta and Tietze [9] reviewed the emergence of care robotics technology and identified individuals, organizations and countries active in research and development.The authors explored how R&D emerged with regard to activity focus, intensity levels and cooperation?The analysis rests on the PATSTAT patent and ISI Web of Science publication data.Bibliographic and network analyses were conducted on country, organization (i.e.universities and firms) and individual levels.According to the authors, today Japanese universities and firms are the most active players, while in early stages US and European organizations pioneered care robotics research.Batcha [10] analyzed robotics research output (5316) data sourced from Web of Science covering the period 1990 to 2016.USA contributed 36.30%largest share to world output.Journal articles account for the largest share (67.40%).Authors from the USA accounted for the largest publications share.

OBJECTIVES
The present investigation aims to study the various dimensions of Indian robotics research, in terms of various bibliometric indicators based on publications and citation data, derived from Scopus database during 2007-16.In particular, the study analyzed overall annual and cumulative growth of Indian publication output, ascertained its global share among top 15 most productive countries, its citation impact, its international collaborative papers share, publication output distributed by broad sub-fields, distribution of publication output by type of robots, productivity and citation impact of top 15 most productive organizations and authors, leading media of communications and characteristics of top highly cited papers.

METHODOLOGY
For this study, the publication data was retrieved and downloaded from the Scopus database (http://www.scopus.com) on Indian robotics research during 2007-16.A main search strategy for global output was formulated, where the keywords such as "robot'' or ''robotics'' were placed in the "keyword tag" or ''Article Title Tag'' or "Source Title tag" and further limited the search output so retrieved to period '2007-16' within "date range tag".This search strategy generated 199237 global publications on robotics research from the Scopus database.This main search strategy was later refined by ''Country Name Tag'' to get robotics research output of individual top 10 most productive countries, including India one by one.Detailed analysis was carried out on 4402 Indian publications data by the authors using the analytical provisions or tags existing in Scopus database such as "subject area tag", "country tag", "source title tag", "journal title name" and "affiliation tag", to get data distribution by subject, collaborating countries, author-wise, organization-wise and journal-wise, etc.For citation data, citations to publications were also collected from date of publication till 13 May 2017.
A series of raw (such as number of papers and international collaborative papers, number of citations, citations per paper) and relative (activity index, relative citation index) bibliometric indicators were used by authors to understand the dynamics of robotics research from different perspective.In data analysis, the authors used complete counting method wherein every contributing author or organization covered in multiple authorship papers was fully counted.All authors or organizations to multi-authored papers have received equal credit in data counting and analysis.

ANALYSIS
Global robotics research cumulated a total of 199237 publications in 10 years during 2007-16.India accounted for 2.21% world share in the field; it cumulated 4402 publications, up from 138 in 2007 to 762 publications in 2016.India registered faster research growth 24.84% in the field compared to 7.71% by the world during the period.(Table 1, Figure 1).India's research output in robotics field averaged citation impact to 4.13 citations per publication (CPP) during 2007-16; its five-year citation impact dropped from 8.34 to 2.15 CPP during the period 2007-11 to 2012-16 (Table 1).

International Collaboration
India contributed a total of 424 international collaborative papers (9.63% share in Indian output) in robotics research in 10 years, and averaged 9.47 citations per paper (4015 citations since their publication during 2007-16).Among its foreign collaborating countries, USA contributed the largest share 56.84%, followed by U.    4).

Analysis by Types of Robotics Research
Analysis of robotics research by type of robots revealed that India's publications output was the largest in mobile robots  • Of the 16 highly cited papers, 2 resulted from the participation of single organizations in their individual capacity (non-collaborative papers) and 14 from participation of two or more organizations in their capacity as collaborators (5 national collaborative and 9 international collaborative papers).
• Among India's highly cited papers, the largest participation was from USA (with 7 papers), followed by Canada (3 papers), China, France and Germany (2 papers each), Italy, New Zealand, Poland, Russia Federation, South Africa, Taiwan and U.K.(1 paper each).
• The 16 highly cited papers involved in all the participation of 96 authors from 92 organizations.
Journal of Scientometric Research, Vol 7, Issue 2, May-Aug 2018 Quality of performance in robotics research in India has been found wanting.Evaluated on the parameter of highly cited papers, only 16 papers (0.36% of 4402 papers) were found to have succeeded in cumulating 100 + citations in 10 years since their publication, an average of 157.12 citations per paper.This is despite the fact that India reported 35% of its output across 157 national and international journals.These 16 highly cited papers involved the participation of 96 authors from 92 organizations; it is evident that large scale collaboration at national international level is critical to produce high quality research in robotics.
Robotics technology has the major potential to improve and advance the speed, quality, and cost of available goods and services in strategic sectors like home and security, defense, medicine, healthcare, space exploration, and others.India should take advantage of robotics technology for its transformation in all sectors of economy.India's robotics industry at present is still in its nascent stages.Its penetration is limited to industrial robotics, in personal or consumer robotics.This situation, however, is starting to change, with the necessary push coming from a clutch of new start-ups.The use of industrial and surgical robots in India is beginning to rise.For all these efforts to bear fruit, India has to have in place an integrated and coordinated policy approach towards robotics research and development in the country.Secondly, India

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: Comparative Growth Rates in Robotics Research 2007-16: World vs India

Figure 2 :
Figure 2: Top 15 Most Productive Countries in the World in Robotics Research: 2007-16.

Table 8 : Contribution of Top 25 Most Productive Journals in India's Robotics Research during 2007-16.
leverage its IT talent pool in developing intelligent programs, server engineering, embedded programming, and other software aspects of robotics, which are as important as the hardware components.In view of above, it is imperative that Indian government and industry should begin to look at and explore new opportunities for facilitating research and technical collaborations with foreign companies and start-ups, engage all the stakeholders in a meaningful conversation and formulate a comprehensive national policy that seeks to push and facilitate the development of the robotics industry in India.The national policy should also seek to promote research aimed at humanitarian and strategic applications to contain the negative impact of robotics on employment and public policy.populartopic in robotics research in India (20.15% share) followed by industrial robots (17.08%), intelligent robots (11.34%), space robots (10.18%), medical robots (4.34%), service robots (4.11%), swarm robots (3.29%), military robots (1.82%), reconfigurable robots (1.52%), etc. during the period.Academic and research institutions in India are the major centres of robotics research.They have accounted for 61.93% and 26.94% publications share respectively and 70.53% and 35.48% citations share respectively.
CONCLUSIONThe study has attempted to provide a quantitative and qualitative description of R&D trends in Indian robotics research, using published data sourced from Scopus international th highest country in robotics research (2.21% global publication share).Computer science, among others, was the most followed subject (67.01%share) in robotics research, followed by engineering (52.34%), mathematics (12.81%), etc. Mobile robots was the most needs to