Indian Contributions to World Soybean Research: Measurement of Research Productivity of Soybean Scientists

Abstract

The paper studies the measurement of research productivity of Indian scientists contributing to world soybean research for the period 1989-2008 based on the data available in the International Crop CD database. The paper measured the publication share of India in the world publication on soybean, its activity index, growth rate and doubling time, analysed the authorship pattern, various statistical distributions of authorship like mean, variance, binomial distributions, negative binomial distributions, geometric distributions; collaboration coefficient and collaboration index, prolific authors and their dominance factor, applicability of Lotka’s law, etc. The paper reveals that India has 2nd rank in research publication with 13.64% share in the world. The activity index of India decreases gradually. The growth rate has also decrease gradually and correspondingly doubling time has increased. The paper reveals high degree of collaboration with 93.10% contributions of joint authorship. The average collaboration coefficient is 0.931 and average collaboration index value is 3.115. Lotka’s Law is still found applicable in the study. The paper than calculate dominance factor (DF) of some prolific authors having 25 or more contributions and found most of the authors with low DF value.