What You’ll Learn
India has seen a dramatic rise in research output over the past decade. This post examines the metrics that drive that growth, asks whether they are measuring the right things, and explores why reform — though difficult — may finally be gaining momentum.
Picture a researcher somewhere in the middle of an academic career. She has ideas worth pursuing. She has a home institution that needs her to publish. She has a funding body that wants to see papers. And she has a system that will judge every one of those papers not on what it says, but on where it appeared, how many times it was cited, and whether the journal carrying it is listed in the right database.
This is not a hypothetical. It is the everyday reality of research life in India — and the metrics shaping that reality deserve far more scrutiny than they typically receive.
The Metrics That Run the Show
When Indian institutions evaluate researchers — for promotion, for tenure, for grants — the currency they trade in is familiar: journal indexing, impact factor, publication count, citation score. These numbers are legible, comparable, and hard to argue with. That, in many ways, is their appeal.
But legibility is not the same as accuracy. Impact factor, for instance, measures the average number of citations received by articles in a journal over two years. It says nothing about the quality of any individual paper. It is a journal-level metric routinely used to make decisions about individual researchers — a category error that has been documented extensively in international scholarship, and that Indian researchers live with every day.
The picture is further complicated by how little anyone actually knows about Indian research assessment as a system. Research by Moumita Koley and Suchiradipta Bhattacharjee at the DST-Centre for Policy Research, IISc Bangalore — among the only scholars to have studied this systematically — found that scholarly literature on how research assessment actually works in India is almost non-existent. The system is quantitative metrics-driven, but poorly understood even by those inside it. The underlying factor of assessment consistently circles back to the same things: journal prestige, publication counts, and citations.¹
Worth noting is that impact factor was never designed for this purpose. It was introduced to help librarians select relevant journals for their institutions — not to evaluate the quality of individual researchers or their work.² Its transformation into a career-defining metric is one of the more consequential category errors in modern academia.
How Institutions Amplify the Pressure
Metrics do not exist in a vacuum. They acquire force because institutions embed them into real consequences.
Accreditation bodies like NAAC require research output data. Ranking systems like NIRF incorporate it. Institutions translate these requirements into targets for departments, and departments pass them on to individual faculty. A researcher who produces genuinely impactful local research that never appears in a Scopus-indexed journal may find herself at a disadvantage against a colleague with a longer list of international publications — regardless of what that list actually contains.
The result is a system that does not ask whether research matters. It asks where research was published.
When Incentives Are Gamed
India is a country that has always found creative solutions to rigid systems. Jugaad — the art of the workaround — is woven into the national fabric. Applied to research incentives, the results are predictable, and damaging.
Paper mills selling authorship, citation cartels in which researchers agree to cite each other regardless of relevance, endogamy within research communities — these are not uniquely Indian problems, but the scale at which they have taken root in India is telling. In 2025, India accounted for approximately 20% of all global research retractions, despite producing around 5% of the world’s research output.³ The ratio is stark.
But the distortion runs deeper than outright fraud. When a system rewards publication volume, it inevitably shapes which research questions get asked in the first place. Topics that lend themselves to frequent, citable output — applying an established method to a new dataset, producing incremental variations on well-worn themes — attract researchers not necessarily because they matter most, but because they score well. Meanwhile, research that is slow, deep, or niche — work addressing local problems, underserved communities, or questions that resist easy quantification — loses out structurally. As Koley and colleagues have noted, niche research focused on societal impact is frequently overlooked under quantitative assessment frameworks, as are qualities like originality, plausibility, and soundness.⁴ A system that cannot see these things will, over time, produce less of them.
This sits alongside a broader paradox. India has dramatically increased its total publication volume over the past decade, and this growth is frequently cited as evidence of a thriving research ecosystem. But volume and impact are not the same thing. The uncomfortable question — one that Indian science policy has been slow to confront — is whether a significant portion of that growth reflects genuine knowledge production, or a rational response to a broken incentive structure.
Why the System Looks the Way It Does
It would be easy, and unfair, to frame this as simply negligence or corruption. The metrics-driven system emerged from a real problem: how do you evaluate research quality fairly, at scale, across hundreds of universities and thousands of researchers, without falling prey to patronage networks and personal influence?
Bibliometrics offered an answer. They were objective, or appeared to be. They were comparable across institutions. They aligned with international standards at a time when India was trying to build global research credibility. The decision to lean on impact factor and indexing was not irrational — it was a solution to a genuine governance problem.
The difficulty is that the solution has calcified into an end in itself. And the global ranking systems that Indian institutions now aspire to perform well in — QS, THE, NIRF — have further baked bibliometrics into how prestige is defined, creating a feedback loop that is very hard to break from within.
Reasons for Cautious Hope
None of this is permanent. The conversation is changing — slowly, and with significant resistance, but it is changing.
Internationally, frameworks like the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Leiden Manifesto have spent years building the intellectual case for evaluating research on its own terms rather than the prestige of the journal containing it. India has a voice in that conversation. Indian researchers are actively participating in shaping these global frameworks — and increasingly making the case for bringing responsible research assessment principles into domestic policy.⁵
Domestically, the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) — India’s apex research funding body — introduced a significant new requirement on 4 May 2026: all applicants to its Advanced Research Grant programme must now disclose details of any publication retractions in the previous five years.⁶ It is a targeted intervention, not a systemic overhaul. But it signals something important: research integrity is beginning to enter the formal language of Indian funding.
There is also an instructive international comparison to be made. China faced a near-identical crisis — rapidly growing publication volumes, high retraction rates, an incentive structure rewarding quantity over quality — and responded with a structured, government-led Excellence Action Plan to raise journal standards and shift the basis of evaluation. The plan is not without its critics, but its ambition is real.⁷ India has yet to develop an equivalent policy framework. The question is whether the conditions for one are beginning to form.
What Would Change Look Like?
Reform of this kind cannot happen at a single point in the system. Researchers cannot change their behaviour while institutions reward the old one. Institutions cannot change their criteria while accreditation bodies and ranking systems demand bibliometric data. Regulators cannot reform in isolation from the international publishing structures within which Indian research operates.
What is needed is coordination — across ANRF and DST on the funding side, UGC and NAAC on the regulatory side, and institutions themselves on the implementation side — around a shared understanding of what Indian research is actually for.
That question — what is Indian research for? — is harder than it sounds. It involves asking whether locally relevant research should be valued differently than globally indexed work. It involves asking whether India’s evaluation systems, many of which were inherited or imported, reflect India’s own research priorities. And it involves acknowledging that the answer will not come from any single metric, however precisely calibrated.
The researchers navigating this system already know that. It is time the system caught up.
Key Takeaways
- Metrics ≠ Quality: India’s research evaluation system relies heavily on journal impact factor, publication counts, and citation scores — but these measure where research is published, not how good it is.
- A tool used out of context: Impact factor was originally designed to help librarians choose journals, not to judge individual researchers — yet it has become a career-defining metric across Indian academia.
- Institutional pressure amplifies the problem: Bodies like NAAC and ranking systems like NIRF embed bibliometric requirements that cascade down to departments and individual faculty, creating relentless pressure to publish in indexed journals.
- Broken incentives breed gaming: When volume is rewarded, fraud follows. India accounts for roughly 20% of global research retractions while producing only about 5% of the world’s research output.
- The wrong questions get asked: Metric-driven systems structurally disadvantage slow, deep, or locally relevant research — pushing researchers toward incremental, easily citable work instead.
- The system wasn’t designed badly — it calcified: Bibliometrics were adopted to solve a real governance problem around fairness and scale, but have since become an end in themselves.
- Change is beginning, cautiously: The ANRF’s 2026 retraction disclosure requirement and India’s growing participation in global reform frameworks like DORA signal early momentum toward accountability.
- Reform requires coordination: No single institution can fix this alone — meaningful change demands alignment across funders, regulators, accreditation bodies, and universities around a shared vision of what Indian research is truly for.
