Impact Analysis of Shodhganga ETD Repository through the Lens of Scopus Citing Documents

Abstract

Shodhganga: a reservoir of Indian theses, a repository developed and maintained by the INFLIBNET Centre, Gandhinagar, hosts and makes accessible thousands of Indian Electronic Theses & Dissertations (ETDs) (PhD theses, including a few thousand MPhil theses). Are those PhD research works used or impacting scholarly communication and academic research in general, and if so, how? To investigate, Elsevier’s Scopus database was searched through its references search feature using search terms/links, i.e., shodhganga, shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in, sg.inflibnet.ac.in, retrievedfromshodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in, and baadalsg.inflibnet.ac.in. It was pre-convinced by the researchers that the references list of any citing documents in which the searched terms/links will appear must have referred to or cited Shodhganga or any of its theses available. A total of 2042 references with the terms mentioned above/links were extracted for further analysis from a total of 1764 citing documents that were retrieved from Scopus. However, the analysis and findings of the study are based on the details of only 1764 handles/theses after removing duplicates, handles those details were either not found or withdrawn from Shodhganga. This article attempts to analyse the impact of India's national ETD repository, Shodhganga, and its theses through reference analysis, finding the top theses. These top universities are cited, and so on.