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W., Uni- form, highly conductive, and patterned transparent films of a percolating silver nanowire network on rigid and flexible sub- strates using a dry transfer technique. Nano Res., 2010, 3, 564– 573. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. We thank DST, MCIT under CEN Phase II, and Space Technology Cell of IISc, Bangalore for financial support. Received 30 January 2014; revised accepted 1 May 2014 Field-normalized bibliometric evaluation of leading research institutions in chemistry in China and India Gangan Prathap* CSIR National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram 695 019, India Chemistry is the biggest area of research in which India publishes and it is the second biggest for China in recent years. Within this broad research area, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) is India’s biggest single academic research contributor, while the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is China’s biggest player. In this communication, we use field-normalized bibliometric indicators from the lat- est (2013) release of SCImago Institutions Rankings World Reports to show that while the leading institu- tions from CSIR are showing a declining trend in the quality of research output, their counterparts from CAS are rapidly improving on both quality and quan- tity terms. Keywords: Bibliometric indicators, chemistry, field- normalization, research institutions ranking. THE Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) are the pre- mier R&D agencies in India and China respectively. While the former has 38 constituent units (laboratories, centres, institutes, etc.), the latter has 124 institutions. In both agencies, institutes dedicated to research in the broad area of chemistry are prominent for their output and quality of research. In India, chemistry is the area in which the largest output is seen, while in China it is the second largest area of research (after engineering). Within the broad research area of chemistry, CSIR and CAS are the biggest single academic research contri- butors for India and China respectively. Most bibliometric exercises are based on using publi- cation counts and citation-based statistics which do not account for varying citation practices in different disci- plines 1 . Schubert and Braun 1 pointed out that comparative assessment of scientometric indicators is greatly hindered by the different standards valid in different science fields and sub-fields. Indicators from different fields can be compared only after first gauging them against a properly chosen reference standard, and thereafter their relative standing can be estimated. This makes comparison and benchmarking of laboratories difficult unless some form of field-normalization is implemented. The SCImago Institutions Rankings (SIR) World Reports 2 (http://www. scimagoir.com/ ) present secondary bibliometric data in