328 DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, Vol. 37, No. 5, September 2017, pp. 328-336, DOI : 10.14429/djlit.37.10637  2017, DESIDOC Received : 12 September 2016, Revised : 21 April 2017 Accepted : 20 July 2017, Online published : 23 October 2017 1. INTRODUCTION India is a very vast country having over 1.25 billion population, spread across 36 states and union territories, having more than 759 universities 1 and over 35,500 affliated colleges with an enrollment capacity of over 20 million students, speaks itself about the vastness and the magnanimity of Indian higher education system 2 . The majority of the students enrolled in these higher education institutions pursue their bachelor’s degree courses and less than 01 percent of these enrolled students pursue their doctoral degrees. The popularity of any given subject discipline gets assessed by the amount of doctoral research undertaken by the research scholars in a particular subject discipline over a period of time. It is a common practice among researchers in general and library and information science researchers in particular to assess the doctoral research output in subject disciplines at an individual level. The trend of assessing the doctoral research output at the collective level in the subject disciplines falling under social sciences, humanities or pure sciences is very uncommon. Accordingly, in the present study an attempt has been made to assess the doctoral degrees awarded in the social sciences in India during 2010 to 2014. Research undertaken in the subject disciplines of social sciences has got a direct bearing on the overall well being and betterment of a society. The greater the amount of research conducted in any social sciences disciplines, higher will be its impact on the society in general and the end users in particular. It is always imperative that scholars undertaking research in any social science subject should produce quality results and the doctoral degree awarded should not be mere degree sake. And so have got research supervisors an important role to play in grooming the budding scholars as serious researchers 3 . The research supervisors own experience can help a great deal in inspiring researchers to handle a real time problem and in undertaking quality research to overcome it. The present study is purely undertaken on the secondary data, compiled from the annual bibliographies published in the social sciences by the Association of Indian Universities, New Delhi. Here an attempt has been made to refect the overall doctoral research scenario of the social science subject disciplines in India. The study simply refects the research trends in the social sciences as the fgures refected are not exhaustive in nature. 2. LITERATURE REvIEw Undertaking research at the doctoral level is a very common practice among the scholars all across the globe it so holds true of evaluate and assess the research output at different levels to refect the strengths and weaknesses in the research activities undertaken by the research scholars of any given institutions, in any given subject disciplines or in any given country. The doctoral dissertations have their own importance in creating new academic knowledge, be it about disciplinary tradition, trends or research techniques 4 .Researchers in Turkey evaluated the doctoral dissertations in Music awarded between Doctoral Research Output in Social Sciences in India during 2010-2014 : A Study Ramesh Pandita * and Shivendra Singh # * Baba Ghulam Shah Badshah University, Rajouri - 185 234, India # Baba Farid University of Health Sciences, Faridkot - 151 203, India * E-mail: rameshpandita90@gmail.com ABSTRACT Presents a trend of doctoral research activities undertaken in social sciences across the institutes of higher learning in India. The study is based on the secondary data compiled from the bibliography of doctoral dissertations, published on an annual basis by the Association of Indian Universities in India, in the feld of social sciences during 2010-2014. The study revealed that in all, 5788 doctoral degrees were awarded across 171 institutes of Higher Learning in India in as many as 17 different social science subject disciplines, with an average of 340.47 doctoral degrees in each subject feld. On an average, each individual, institution has awarded 33.84 doctoral degrees. Education, commerce and economics are the three leading subject disciplines, in which maximum doctoral degrees were awarded, while as Tourism stands at the bottom. Similarly, at the state level, the maximum doctoral degrees were awarded from Gujarat, which is followed by Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, while as at institutional level; Dr B.R. Amedkar Marathwada University, Jawaharlal University and Maharishi Dayanand University are the three leading institutes across the country, which awarded the maximum number of doctoral degrees. Keywords: India; Higher education; Social science research; Doctoral research output; AIU