Washington / New Delhi: With over 1.35 lakh scientific papers published, India has become the world's third largest publisher of science and engineering articles, according to a US government agency data, topped by China.
As per the statistics compiled by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), the number of scientific papers published worldwide increased from 1,755,850 in 2008 to 2,555,959 in 2018.
The global research output, as measured by peer-reviewed science and engineering (S&E) journal articles and conference papers, grew about four per cent annually over the last 10 years.
The data, which was released on Tuesday, stated that in 2008, India published 48,998 science and engineering articles. This increased to 1,35,788 articles in 2018 at an average annual growth rate of 10.73 per cent and the country now accounts for 5.31 per cent of the total world publications in science and engineering.
China, which accounts for 20.67 per cent of all global publications in scientific articles, is at the top position, followed by the US at 16.54 per cent.
In China, the number of global scientific publications increased from 2,49,049 in 2008 to 5,28,263 in 2018, at a growth rate of 7.81 per cent per annum.
The US, the total global publications in science and engineering articles grew at a rate of 0.71 per cent from 3,93,979 in 2008 to 4,22,808 in 2018.
Though a long way to go, as compared to the US and China in terms of the number of scientific article publications, India's emergence as third largest publisher is mainly due to a phenomenal double-digit growth rate in the last one decade from 2008 to 2018, the report noted.
The other countries which made it to the top 10 list are Germany (1,04,396), Japan (98,793), UK (97,681), Russia (81,579), Italy (71,240), South Korea (66,376) and France (66,352).
According to the report, China's rate of research output has grown almost twice as fast as the world's annual average for the last 10 years, while the output of the US and the European Union (EU) has grown at less than half the world's annual growth rate.
