How collaborative is Indian academia? A case study of top three ranked institutions

The present study employs bibliometric methods to examine the pattern of existing collaboration in India’s top three ranked academic institutes using publications indexed in the Web of Science for the period 2000 to 2020. The results show although the number of collaborations and the degree of collaboration have increased over time, however, the collaboration coefficient remains almost the same in the three institutes. The lesser negative Pearson correlation between authors and articles with a higher positive Pearson correlation between articles and citations for JNU publications suggests that collaboration with a smaller group is more successful than a larger group for gaining citations. Collaborative publications of Banaras Hindu University (36%) and Indian Institute of Science (33%) are more inclined towards authors of the same department, while for Jawaharlal Nehru University, it is with other authors from different universities (41%). The foreign collaboration for all three institutes is almost the same. The network visualization of collaboration in three institutes suggests that the collaborative research in IISc is more diverse than JNU or BHU and in national collaboration, distance between two national organizations also play an important role for strong collaboration. Overall, theoretical aspects of physics lead in collaborative publications followed by chemical sciences. Agricultural biotechnology, clinical medicine, polymer sciences and nanoscience are some emerging disciplines where organizations are increasing their participation through collaborative research.