An Investigation into the Status of Karnataka State in Shodhganga, the National Open Repository of ETDs in India

Institutional repositories are the online hub of the intellectual output of academic institutions which can be accessed and used by the scholastic and research community for their research. The Shodhganga, the national-level repository of academic theses and dissertations generated in the Universities in India, is freely accessible to the scholarly community. This paper investigates the extent of the contribution of the Karnataka state in Shodhganga in terms of the Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) hosted in the repository. Data for the study are extracted from Shodhganga directly and further organized and analysed based on the objectives formulated. The findings show that among the 51 universities in the state, only 25 are contributing to Shodhganga. A total of 13244 theses have been uploaded to the repository till 29th April 2019 of which the number of theses in language & linguistics are high with 1895 records. Karnatak University and the University of Mysore are the top ETDs depositors from the state with 4349 and 2851 theses respectively. The authors suggest that there is a need for meaningful and robust research to uplift our country to a ‘developed’ one by creating a central point to diffuse scientific information to the scientific community with a free key to open it