Bibliometric Dimensions of Research in Social Sciences: An Empirical Analysis of Indian Central Universities

This paper evaluates the performance of the 14 most productive Central Universities in Social Sciences research. The study is based on the Scopus Indexing database for the period from 2009 to 2018 where the total records retrieved were 7278. Results revealed that journal articles were the most preferred form of publication with 4293 (59%) research papers and the mean annual growth rate of publications was 1.01 while the Mean RGR (Relative Growth Rate) and DT (Doubling Time) were 0.314 and 2.751 respectively. The total number of citations received was 38456 with 5.77 mean citations per paper. Out of the total retrieved records, 4504 papers were cited and the share of open access citation was 71.9 percentage. Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), Delhi University (DU), and Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) emerged as the top three universities in Social Sciences research based on Total Publications (TP), Total Citations (TC), Highly Cited Papers (HCP), h-index and g-index. The p index of JNU, AMU, and DU are 35.68, 34.53, and 33.64 respectively. The mean of various bibliometric indicators namely, DC, CI, CC, and MCC were found to be 0.605, 2.306, 0.393, and 0.394 respectively. Economic and Political Weekly was the most prolific journal and R. H. Khan of AMU was the most productive author during the study period with 42 papers and with an h-index of 18.