230 DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, Vol. 39, No. 5, Sept 2019, pp. 230-237, DOI : 10.14429/djlit.39.5.14602  2019, DESIDOC Received : 28 May 2019, Revised : 09 August 2019 Accepted : 22 August 2019, Online published : 12 September 2019 Trends in Pharmaceutical Scholarly Communications from India, China and United States: A Comparative Study Priyambada Das * and D.B. Ramesh Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan (Deemed to be University), Khandagiri, Bhubaneswar - 751 030, India * E-mail: priyambadadas@soa.ac.in ABSTRACT The present study throws light on the scholarly communication of three leading countries in the feld of pharmaceutical research as refected in SCOPUS database during 1998-2017. In terms of publication output, United States with two leading Asian countries, China and India leads with 40.54 per cent share of the global research publication share in pharmaceutical sciences. The global outcome of scholarly communication in the feld of pharmaceutical research is 1395221. The study mainly focuses both on qualitative and quantitative research growth of United States, China and India in terms of output of scholarly communication, citation impact, relative research efort, common sources used for publications and research collaboration. The growth pattern of three leading countries is highly chaotic. The relative research efort of India and China increased during 2008-2017 while in United States, it was decreased. Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry, Tetrahedron Letters and Tetrahedron are the common source of communication in these three countries. All the three countries show the positive shift in international collaboration during 1998-2002 to 2012-2017 in pharmaceutical research. Keywords: Pharmaceutical research; Activity index; Transformative activity index; h-Index; Impact factor; Scientometrics. 1. INTRODUCTION The main purpose of any research is discovery, invention, research and development for the beneft of mankind. The main aim of pharmaceutical research is invention of new drugs to eradicate illness from the society. The pharmaceutical research is a boon for the mankind. An exponential growth in pharmaceutical research has been found during the last four decades. From drug discovery to its successful therapeutic outcomes, pharmaceutical feld involves many disciplines such as chemistry, biology, pharmaceutics and biotechnology 1 . The impact of pharmaceutical research is directly related to cure the lives of human beings and animals from various diseases. Scientometrics plays a vital role in the assessment of scholarly communication. It is a technique which is used to analyse both the quantity and quality of scholarly communications using various scientometric indicators. The assessment of scholarly communication is a challenging task. Olmeda-Gomez 2 , et al., accessed the Pharmacology research output of world as indexed in Scopus database. In terms of quantitative and qualitative research, North America and Western Europe leads in Pharmacology research. However, North Africa leads in receiving citation from foreign countries other than domestic citations. Sweileh 3 , et al., analysed scholarly communication of community pharmacy of 13 Middle Eastern Arab (MEA) countries during the period 2003-2012 and indexed in Scopus database. Kingdom of Saudi Arabia topped the list. Middle Eastern countries carried out international research collaboration with Malaysia, Pakistan, UK, Australia, Finland, New Zealand, India and USA. Ding 4 , et al., assessed the pharmacology research output of China and other top 10 representative countries. China’s research output and share has shown a steady increase over the research period that is during 2001 to 2011. During the period, other western countries have not shown signifcant diference in terms of bibliometric indicators as their research has reached its peak ten years ago. Alhaider 5 , et al. made a qualitative and quantitative assessment of research of Saudi Arabia in the feld of pharmaceutical sciences as indexed in SCOPUS database. Saudi Arabia research growth increased during the research period of 2001-2010 in terms of publications with annual average growth rate of 14.2 per cent. Saudi Arabia published a largest share with Egypt in terms of international collaboration followed by USA, India and UK. Mulimani and Hadagali 6 analysed the research growth of BRICS countries in the feld of pharmacy and pharmacology as indexed in Web of Science, a multidisciplinary bibliographic database during 2001to 2016 using various scientometric indicators. China has shown a signifcant growth during the period of study and may be a strong competitor for developed countries like USA in terms of research output. Verma and Shukla 7 analysed the research trend of information literacy of selected countries in terms of annual growth rate, compound annual growth rate, doubling time, most prolifc authors and found that maximum