Research on Himalayas: A Scientometric Analysis

Abstract

Himalayas is one of the largest mountain ranges which spread across many countries in South and South East Asia having highest peaks in the world. It is aimed at identifying the range of research activities taking place on the Zoological, Botanical, Social, Natural and Geological aspects of the Himalayas, particularly documented in high impact journals and reputed publications across the world. To ensure the assessment of qualitative research documented on Himalayas, the researcher chosen the prominent and highly acclaimed indexing source of scientific research that is Web of Science, which is indexing 13,975 journals globally. The data downloaded for the years 1989-2016, a period of 28 years would reveal that there is a gradual growth with slight variations on the research output for the study period, particularly the current decade registered exponential growth in a consistent manner and the year 2015 recorded highest amount of research output. It is also found that citation trend correlated with the growth of the literature. As there is a gradual growth on the citations received by the publications on Himalayas research output, the years 2013, 2014 and 2015 registered large number of citations. There are 4,696 publications as the outcome; they received 81,994 Global Citation Score which include 48,478 citing articles with a high h-index of 116. The analysis shows that the research on Himalayas carried out in 115 areas by 10,229 researchers affiliated to 2845 research institutions spread across 94 countries. Of the total of 4696 publciations; 2151 articles are as the outcome of research funding from various agencies across the world. It is revealed from the study that the top countries alone contributed more than 50 % of the research, while India (40.2 %), USA (17.2 %) and People R China (14.9 %) were in top three positions. With regard to funding on Himalayas research, China (17.76 %) contributed a major stake which followed by USA (5.67 %), next holds India (2.70 %). With regard to research areas Geology (20.87 %), Environmental Sciences Ecology (14.16 %), Plant Science (9.73 %) are the top major areas in which the Himalayas research outcome is documented.