India is lagging behind when we talk about scientific publishing. In fact, considering the population of our country, we should be leading the world in these numbers. Yet, we are far behind in the race. Let’s take a look at the scenario of the world and the reasons for our poor performance.
The US is the clear winner here with China as the runner up. We can also see that the European countries are also doing fairly good.
- One of the most basic and obvious reasons for the lagging behind of India is illiteracy.
- To add to that, we have an outdated and poorly managed education system. We need to learn from these countries and work on our weak areas.
- We also have a poor incentive system for scientific writing. There are hardly any requirements in place for professors or university and school students to contribute to scientific journals
- We are unable to control plagiarism and have not made stringent laws or awareness around the topic itself to improve our contributions at the same standards that are scientifically followed by the rest of the world. In fact many school students and even faculty is often seen copying content directly from the Internet and not realise the implications of that act.
We are one of the biggest human-resource bases of the world and with a proper education system and opportunities to people, we can be at the top of this ladder in scientific publishing. These surveys and studies showing India in poor light need to be shared more openly across the country so that people can take steps for improvement!