Collaborative Authorship in Scholarly Indian Publications in Biochemistry: A Study based on the Web of Science

Using Web of Science as the source of data, the authors investigate the characteristics of research contributions in biochemistry emanated from India during 2004-2013. A total of 25132 items have been identified as produced during a span of 10 years, and their annual growth rate is estimated as 12.5% with the exception of the year 2013. Almost 97.5% of the contributions are of collaborative authorship, with number of authors in the range of 2 to 253. Groups comprising 2 to 4 scientists are found responsible for 62.8% of the contributions. Three member groups have authored the maximum share of 22.83% papers. Degree of collaboration of biochemists as reflected in Indian contributions is in the range of 0.97 to 0.98. Mean of CoAuthorship Index (CAI) estimated for three blocks, namely single-authored, two author and > 2 author contributions are found to be 104.4, 102.7 and 99.2 respectively. A consistent increase in CAI of more than 2 author contributions is observed since 2010.