Universities wasting taxpayers' money? No, India is actually improving

• The number of scientific papers that were published from India in 2013.

• In 2009, about 62,955 scientific papers were published

• In 2014, 112,009 papers were produced, increasing by a meagre 5%.

• During this time, India's share of the world output of international collaboration publications increased from 3.3% to 3.9%.

• In 2009, India's output crossed Spain, Australia, Korea, Brazil, Sweden and Singapore. In 2013, India even crossed Canada and Italy.

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• Total number of India's patent citations in 2013.

• In 2009, the number was 953.

• India's global share during this period increased from 1.7% to 2.2%.

• Elsevier states: "India is still a relatively small player on the global scientific stage, its wide-ranging international collaboration network and increasing shares of the world's main research performance indicators reflect its overall growth in output, impact and knowledge transfer."

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• Chemistry and Pharmacology, the two main areas of scientific focus in India between 2009-13.

• The Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, led in Chemistry, while Annamalai University excelled in Pharmacology.

• India's top three institutions in science and technology in this period were the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Delhi.

• The bottom three were the University of Mysore, the Jawaharlal Nehru University and the University of Pune.

• The number of science researchers in India.

• Though India's output has increased, the citation impact is 0.75, which is 25% less than the global average.

• Engineering papers are cited the most (still 6% less than the world average), followed by materials science and veterinary science.

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• The proportion of India's scholarly output that was the result of international collaboration.

• The 'most impactful' collaborations were with Brazil, Russia, Netherlands, Spain, China and Sweden. The least impactful was with Malaysia.

• However, the highest share of publications in India are a result of institutional collaboration, followed by national-level collaborations, and the least, single-author.

India is taking small steps and improving, even crossing China. "On the quality side, although we see an overall impact that is below the world's average, there is a rising share of higher-quality articles from India. Articles from India that resulted from international collaboration show impressively high quality, at more than twice the impact of articles from a single institute," said Dr Michiel Kolman, senior vice-president of academic relations at Elsevier.

Edited by Shreyas Sharma

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