Research

Responsible Research Assessment

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Responsible Research Assessment

Exploring the Current Practices in Research Assessment within Indian Academia

Funded by: DORA (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment) under the Community Engagement Grant Program 

About the project 

India has a considerably large research community of ministries, scientific  and industrial research organisations; universities, research councils, and autonomous institutions directly dealing with research/funding. The country also boasts of ~0.34 million FTE researchers. The quantum of research undertaken/funded by these institutions are also quite large. Research assessment criteria vary with the type of institutions, research, and the goal of assessment. 

However, like many other countries, research assessment in Indian institutions and funding agencies is currently overly dependent on matrices such as Journal Impact Factor (JIF), h-index, etc. Though started well intended, matrices proliferated to be an abused instrument. Keeping this in view, the proposed project aims to initiate a broader discussion on the framework used by these institutions, their institutional capacities, and strengths and gaps in the existing practices. 

For this purpose, we plan to organise a series of workshops with the major stakeholders of the Indian research ecosystem to understand and deliberate on the strengths and weaknesses of current practices. 

Expected outcome

The workshop outcome will help us better understand the existing practices, how to look beyond the quantitative journal indicator-based metrics, and suggest pathways to make them more effective and inclusive wherever necessary. The project outcome will help the institutions build robust, flexible research assessment frameworks.

For more information, please see the project website and contact Dr. Momita Koley or Dr. Suchiradipta Bhattacharjee

 

Higher Education

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Higher Education

Higher Education

Higher education institutions play a central role in developing the human, social, and knowledge capital of the STI ecosystems. The Centre’s work on higher education is focused on:

(a) scientometric  studies of publications from Indian institutions with a view to elucidate their research productivity and strengths in different fields of science and technology, and

(b) a study on doctoral education in India whose aim is to assess the level and quality of training received by doctoral students to prepare them for both academic and non-academic careers.

The project on Doctoral Education in India is a multi-institution collaboration led by DST-CPR at IISc, with project investigators drawn from the University of Washington (Prof. Maresi Nerad, who is a visiting professor at our Centre), Manipal Academy of Higher Education (Prof. Neeta Inamdar), Jindal Global University (Prof. Anamika Srivastava), IIM-Ahmedabad (Prof. Devasmita Chakraverty), FLAME University (Prof. Poonam Pandey), and IISc (Prof. T.A. Abinandanan. The project aims at mapping research scholars’ journey through their PhD years to develop a detailed understanding of their motivation, reasons for choosing an institution / department / subfield / thesis committee or supervisor, the breadth and depth of training in both academic and extra-academic domains, and effectiveness of their preparation for their post-PhD careers.

 

For more information, please contact Prof. Abinandanan or Prof. Maresi Nerad

Sectoral Research and Innovation

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Sectoral Research and Innovation

Sectoral Research and Innovation

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is part of a larger set of ideas and initiatives addressing socially responsible innovation and describes a research and innovation process that considers effects and potential impacts on the environment and society. RRI “refers to the comprehensive approach of proceeding in research and innovation in ways that allow all stakeholders that are involved in the processes of research and innovation at an early stage (A) to obtain relevant knowledge on the consequences of the outcomes of their actions and on the range of options open to them and (B) to effectively evaluate both outcomes and options in terms of societal needs and moral values and (C) to use these considerations (under A and B) as functional requirements for design and development of new research, products and services.”[a] The Centre has the following on-going research projects under this theme.

1. Responsible Research and Innovation to engage with Vulnerabilities of Agricultural Systems

2. Transitioning to a bio-based economy: a comparative study of innovation ecosystem for II generation (lignocellulose based) biofuels in India and Brazil.

3. What twirls the triple-helix for biofuels: A scientometrics and patentometrics study of top five biofuel producers in the world.

 [a] European Commission (2013). “Options for Strengthening Responsible Research and Innovation – Report of the Expert Group on the State of Art in Europe on Responsible Research and Innovation” (PDF). doi:10.2777/46253.

For more details, please contact Dr. Poonam Pandey

 

Rare Diseases

Rare diseases (RD) are severe and debilitating conditions that affect a small fraction of the population. These diseases are often not prioritised in the agenda-setting of government or the pharmaceutical industry. As such, there is a huge lack of awareness and medical attention to these diseases. This project aims to analyse the policy environment in India and identify the facilitators and barriers towards achieving equitable and affordable healthcare for people living with RDs. Through this project, we also attempt to explore ways to integrate public health thinking into RD management, raise awareness, and initiate discussion around RDs in India.

For more information, please contact Dr. Mohua Chakraborty Choudhury

Open Science

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Open Science

Open Science

The benefits of open science are multifold. It fosters transparency and efficiency of research and encourages collaborations and maximum resource utilisation. Overall, open science stimulates economic growth and meaningful scientific interventions in public lives. If we can adapt the practices of open science, it will be beneficial to guide the Indian research system towards higher competitiveness and quality. Researchers from the publicly funded Universities should share research publications and more importantly, research data, which includes negative results as well. More engagement/ dialogue between researchers and the public must be encouraged to make research more societal-need driven. There is an urgent need to stop relying on a “one-sided evaluation system” based on research articles and journal impact factors for research evaluation, funding. More importantly, the very fundamental of research projects must be the need of the society, not driven by the research choices of high impact commercial journals.

Free flow of science will help promote a transparent, collaborative and inspirational research process. The advancement of digital technologies has created online platforms to organise and publish the results of research projects, scientific publications and large data sets and make them available to a broader scientific community, potential users from the MSME sectors and the public in general. Cross-discipline learning and collaboration became a reality with the advancement of technologies. However, only a smaller section of the scientific community has woken up to support the causes of open science. We need wider participation to make open science a reality. It is very much true for India as well. We are far behind in adopting the open science practices. Nurturing open science will need some push from the system to make the researchers adopt open science practices.  It’s high time for us to embrace the concepts of open science. Open science can potentially navigate the current research ecosystem from publications driven to societal need driven.

For more information, please contact Dr. Momita Koley- moumitakoley@iisc.ac.in

Open Access Digital Publishing Platform

Science Diplomacy

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Science Diplomacy

Science Diplomacy

Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) Diplomacy is being increasingly used by countries around the world as an important instrument in foreign policy and diplomacy activities, especially in commercializing the nascent and potential capabilities of national STI ecosystems in emerging and strategic technologies such as Quantum Technologies, Artificial Intelligence, and Biotechnology. The Centre’s research on STI diplomacy is focused on (a) studying the role of STI, particularly in emerging technologies, in India’s foreign policy agenda, and (b) examining relationships between India’s STI capabilities and foreign policy goals, and (c) developing policy options for India’s efforts in STI diplomacy.

 

Emerging Technologies

Emerging Technologies such as AI, Blockchain, Genome editing and Quantum technologies are essential drivers of the next phase of development. However, their immense possible impact on all walks of life necessitates the formulation of policy frameworks for their governance. Such policy frameworks should also incorporate tech diplomacy and global tech governance dimensions due to the inherently transboundary nature of these technologies. This project is an early attempt towards developing policy and governance frameworks for emerging technologies with the initial focus on Genome editing and Quantum technologies.

 

Biosecurity

For more details, please contact, Dr. Suryesh K Namdeo or Dr. B Chagun Basha

Scientometrics

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Scientometrics

Scientometrics

Scientometrics is the study of measuring and analyzing science, technology and innovation, which includes the measurement of impact, reference sets of articles to investigate the impact of journals and institutes, understanding of scientific citations, mapping scientific fields and the production of indicators for use in policy contexts. The Centre has an active working group on scientometrics with the focus on accessing how well Indian institutions perform in various fields of scientific research. The team, led by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam (a globally renowned scientometrician), has developed a methodology for data-collecting and a general framework for studying the research performance of Indian institutions in various scientific disciplines. Through which, the Centre currently has on-going studies to evaluate the research performance of some of the major disciplines, such as chemistry, engineering, materials, astrophysics, mathematics, biological sciences, and physics.

 
 

STI Indicators and R&D Statistics

STI Indicators: Measuring STI is fundamental for the formulation of national innovation strategies.  Absence of “relevant” indicators is often considered a major obstacle for the design and implementation of STI policies in developing countries. The existing indicators are failing to serve their very own purpose in the policy – making process, because the existing indicators do not capture the relationship between STI activities and socioeconomic development. As a matter of fact, macro level indicators do not always reflect capabilities to achieve microlevel developmental targets.  The issues are becoming more cross-disciplinary in nature. The notion of linear relation between R&D activities (between R&D input and output) is vanishing and R&D as a process (input, output, outcome and impact) is becoming more and more of a complex system. The conventional STI indicators limit itself only to inputs and outputs; neglecting the monitoring of outcomes and impacts of STI process. The idea of harnessing the efforts in STI to achieve the development goals demands for new forms of indicators.  With this background, this work attempts to develop a conceptual framework for cross-cutting STI indicators interlaced between STI capabilities and developmental targets.

 

R&D Statistics are very important to formulate accurate indicators to monitor country’s R&D efforts. Accurate data-collection ensures reliability of the R&D indicators; and these indicators are very important to craft effective public policies. To produce R&D statistics, the methodology proposed by the OECD in the Frascati Manual (FM) is used extensively in both OECD and Non-OECD developing countries, even though it was originally written for R&D surveys in just OECD member countries. The characteristics of research systems in developing countries differ significantly from the OECD countries. Developing countries face problems when trying to apply the FM standards to the situation in their country. Hence, UNESCO Institute of Statistics (UIS) has come-up with an annex to FM – to provide suggestions on how the concepts in the FM should be interpreted to ensure that data better reflect the characteristics of R&D activity in developing countries while still maintaining international comparability. However, in Indian context, there are still several challenges related to R&D data, particularly in terms of its reliability, accessibility and availability. This study compares the R&D data-collection methodology in different countries to learn how the FM methodology is adapted in various national setups to construct their data-collection models to achieve reliable R&D statistics.

 

For more details, please contact, Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Prof. Abinandanan or M Madhan