GENERAL ARTICLES CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 114, NO. 4, 25 FEBRUARY 2018 740 K. S. Rajan and S. Swaminathan are in the Centre for Nanotechnology & Advanced Biomaterials, SASTRA Deemed University, Thanjavur 613 401, India and S. Vaidhyasubramaniam is in SASTRA Deemed University, Thanjavur 613 401, India. *For correspondence. (e-mail: ksrajan@chem.sastra.edu) Research output of Indian institutions during 2011–2016: quality and quantity perspective K. S. Rajan*, S. Swaminathan and S. Vaidhyasubramaniam The publication output from Indian institutions has been steadily increasing during the last few years. This may be attributed to the higher investment in research and also linking the number of publications with career advancement. There is a need to analyse the publication output of Indian institutions in terms of quality of publications. In this study, output in the top 10 percentile, as com- puted by SciVal (a product of Elsevier), has been used as an indicator of the quality of research output, since it reflects the percentage of an institution’s publication in the top 10 percentile of the most cited articles. Out of the 15 subject areas listed in SciVal, 7 contribute to more than 65% of publications from Indian institutions. Accordingly, Indian institutions with output in the top 10 per- centile greater than the national average in these 7 major subject areas have been identified to compare their research output in terms of quality. Keywords: Public and private institutions, performance assessment, quality and quantity perspective, research output. SCHOLARLY research output in terms of publication in journals is continuously used as an indicator by various funding agencies in the country as well as by the Univer- sity Grants Commission to compute the academic performance index (API) for faculty recruitment and promotion. To improve the API scores, some faculty have started their own journals for increasing the publication output. It has been reported that about 27% of the pub- lishers of the fake journals and 42% of the fake single- journal publishers are based in India 1,2 . Over a period of time, more importance has been given to the number of publications and analysis of research output has also been based on the quantity 3 . Hence the quantity has taken over the quality aspects in measuring the scholarly output of institutions 3 . The scientometric profiles of Indian institutions based on publication output, as reflected in the Science Citation Index (SCI) and Indian Science Abstracts (ISA), have been reported 4,5 . A scientometric study revealed that 29 institutions contributed to 45% of all publications from India in SCI journals in 1997 (ref. 4). Another analysis carried out on the publication output of Indian institutions during 2006 in journals abstracted in ISA revealed that the universities, colleges, state Agricultural Universities and medical institutions contributed to more than 70% of the country’s publication output 5 . In terms of the number of publications, top 50 institutions contributed to 25% of India’s publication output and more than 3380 other insti- tutions contributed to the remaining 75% (ref. 5). The authors concluded that Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) could be used along with ISA for assessment of publication output 5 . Prathap and Gupta 6 ranked the Indian engineering and technological institutions based on their publication performance during 1998–2008 computed using p-index, a function of the number of citations and number of publications. A composite index containing total number of papers, number of citations, highly cited papers and number of papers with international collaborations has also been proposed in the literature 7 . The Central Universities in India were ranked based on the composite index calcu- lated for the period 2010–2014. University of Delhi and Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Varanasi emerged as the top-ranked Central Universities 7 . Databases such as Scopus, WoS, Google Scholar, etc. provide information about articles, authors, citations, institutions and countries. Some of the common parame- ters that are used to evaluate the performance of the faculty or institutions are the number of publications, im- pact factor, citations and h-index. These parameters suf- fer from the following limitations while considering them for assessment of the performance of faculty: (i) impact factor of science journals is higher when compared to those of engineering, social sciences and humanities journals; (ii) the number of citations can be polarized through a few highly cited articles, and (iii) h-index does