101 SURWASE, KADEMANI & KUMAR: SCIENTOMETRIC DIMENSIONS OF PULSED LASER DEPOSITION RESEARCH Annals of Library and Information Studies Vol. 55, June 2008, pp. 101-110 Scientometric dimensions of pulsed laser deposition research: a global perspective Ganesh Surwase, B.S. Kademani and Vijai Kumar Scientific Information Resource Division, Knowledge Management Group, Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Mumbai-400085, E-mails: ganeshbarc@yahoo.co.in; bskademani@yahoo.co.in; bsk@barc.gov.in Attempts to highlight quantitatively the growth and development of world literature in the field of pulsed laser deposition in terms of publication output as per Science Citation Index (1982-2006). During 1982-2006 a total of 8534 papers were published by the scientists in the field pulsed laser deposition. The average number of publications published per year was 341.36. The highest number of papers 1074 were published in 2005. There were 84 countries involved in the research in this field. USA is the top producing country with 2014 publications (19.35%) followed by Japan with 1553 publications (14.92%), Peoples-R-China with 1106 publications (10.63%), Germany with 763 publications (7.33%) South Korea with 694 publications (6.67%) and France with 615 publications (5.91%). India ranked 9 th among other countries with 291 publications during 1985- 2006. Authorship and collaboration trend was towards multi-authored papers. There were 8338 (97.70%) multi-authored publications and 196 (2.30 %) single authored publications. Chinese Academy of Sciences (Peoples-R-China) topped the list with 304 publications followed by Nanjing University (Peoples-R-China) with 244 publications, Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan) with 233 publications and CNRS (France) with 217 publications. The most productive Indian institutions were: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai with 52 publications and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore with 49 publications. The most prolific Indian authors were: R. Pinto (Indian-Inst-Technol-Bomaby, Mumbai) with 38 publications, M.S. Hegde (Indian-Inst-Sci, Bangalore) with 31 publications, S.B. Ogale (Univ Pune, Pune) with 29 publications, L.M. Kukreja (Raja Ramanna Ctr-Adv-Technol, Indore) with 21 publications, P. Misra (Raja Ramanna Ctr-Adv-Technol, Indore) with 16 publications, R.K. Thareja (Indian-Inst-Technol-Kanpur) with 15 publications. The most preferred journals by the scientists were: Applied Physics Letters with 962 publications, Journal of Applied Physics with 714 publications, Applied Surface Science with 614 publications and Thin Solid Films with 541 publications. Introduction Invention of laser in 1960 has opened up new areas of research and found various applications in many scientific fields. Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) is one of the several techniques of the deposition of the thin film on the substrates besides other techniques like Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE), Metal Organic Chemical Vapour Deposition (MOCVD) and Sputtering 1- 2 . The pulsed laser deposition has several advantages over other deposition techniques. There are several applications of the thin films developed because of its helpful technique in developing quantum dots and quantum wells of several sizes and shapes. Pulsed laser deposition as a film growth technique has gained importance and attracted wide spread interests after it has been used successfully to grow high- temperature Tc superconducting films 3 in 1987. During the last decade, pulsed laser deposition has been used to fabricate crystalline thin films with epitaxy quality. Ceramic oxide, nitride films, metallic multilayers, and various super-lattices grown by pulsed laser deposition have been demonstrated. It has been reported in the literature that pulsed laser deposition is being used to synthesise nanotubes 4 , nanopowders 5 and quantum dots 6 . Evaluation is a key component of any research and development activity. A well known productivity indicator is the number of publications produced by the scientists, institutions and countries. Studies like this will provide some insight into the complex dynamics of research activity and enable the scientists, policy makers and science administrators to provide adequate facilities and proper guidance as to which direction the research has to be conducted. Research publications are clearly one of the quantitative measures for the basic research activity in a country. It must be added, however, that what excites the common man, as well as the scientific community, are the peaks of scientific and technological achievement, not just the