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  • Social Science Research in India: Status, Issues, and Policies by Sukhadeo Thorat and Samar Verma
  • Simran Preet Kaur (bio)
Sukhadeo Thorat and Samar Verma. Social Science Research in India: Status, Issues, and Policies.
New Delhi: Oxford University Press and Indian Council of Social Science Research, 2017. Pp. xli, 613. Paper: isbn-13 978-0-19-947441-7, us$90, inr1495.

The book under review is a timely contribution to emerging discussions on the challenges, strengths, and weaknesses of social science research and publication in Indian academia. Although in recent years there has been a significant turn toward discussions of the quality of higher education in India, particularly after neo-liberal policies opened up India's education sector to foreign players, comprehensive volumes attempting to bring together pertinent empirical evidence for an informed debate were not forthcoming. This book, in an effort to understand the nature and direction of social science research in India, successfully brings together a wide range of quantitative and qualitative information to help readers map the analytical and empirical terrain of the academic research enterprise within the Indian university system. As noted in the preface by Alberto Martnelli (president, International Social Science Council, Paris), this volume complements and enriches the World Social Science Reports published since 2010 and offers a valuable model for similar publications in other countries and regions (xix).

The book is particularly interesting for its empathetic yet critical approach to the accomplishments of Indian social science scholars. It primarily draws on a diverse set of Indian sources like the Kothari Commission Report, published from time to time with the intention of working toward the creation of national frameworks and promoting research endeavours in the social sciences. Exploring various challenges that social science research in India faces, the book recognizes, inter alia, inadequate financial resources and research infrastructure as prominent [End Page 487] factors responsible for its relative backwardness. Nevertheless, the book also points to the bold efforts India has made in the past to overcome these limitations. Organizations such as the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) and the Indian Council of Historical Research have been established to promote research standards and output. These organizations have constantly encouraged interdisciplinary research and scholarly collaboration, inspiring universities to sign memoranda of understanding with foreign institutions, and providing financial assistance to researchers that allows them to delve into their work and helps do away with discipline-related imbalances.

The book is divided into five sections. Section 1 deals primarily with research infrastructure, focusing on social science departments in universities, independent research institutions, and research journals and international collaborations. Section 2 provides a discipline-wise analysis of research output according to the classification of eleven disciplines identified by the ICSSR, a classification that does not, however, represent an exhaustive list. Pertinent here is the methodology that the authors adopt for their analysis. They quantify the number and percentage of articles and books published in each discipline by collecting information from various sources such as the Institute for Studies in Industrial Development (ISID), Scopus, the Library of Congress, the National Library of India, and others. The authors go on to analyse similar data for sub-areas in the disciplines. The authors also provide a regional distribution of research output in India, innovatively not doing so in terms of state-wise statistics, but in terms of East, West, Northeast, Central, Southwest, North, and South India. This approach gives a more productively disaggregated picture of the research contributions that have emerged from integrated regional collectives of educational institutions located in geographically comparable units on the subcontinent.

Section 3 looks closely at the quality of research publications, both at the national and international levels. The book provides a perspective for conceptualizing the quality of research and proceeds to look at both scholarly citations and readership for articles. The authors carried out painstaking work to identify 21,351 articles from 1006 journals in Scopus and 104 journals from ISID. They sourced citation statistics from Google Scholar and assessed readership from Google hits (the number of hits an article received in a Google keyword search). Journal quality was determined using the fourfold criteria of impact factor, online presence, [End Page...

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