International Collaboration in Science in India and its Impact on Institutional Performance

In this paper, our objective is to delineate some of the problems that could arise in using research output for performance evaluation. Research performance in terms of the Impact Factor (IF) of papers, say of scientific institutions in a country, could depend critically on coauthored papers in a situation where internationally co-authored papers are known to have significantly different (higher) impact factors as compared to purely indigenous papers. Thus, international collaboration not only serves to increase the overall output of research papers of an institution, the contribution of such papers to the average Impact Factor of the institutional output could also be disproportionately high. To quantify this effect, an index of gain in impact through foreign collaboration (GIFCOL) is defined such that it ensures comparability between institutions with differing proportions of collaborative output. A case study of major Indian institutions is undertaken, where Cluster Analysis is used to distinguish between intrinsically high performance institutions and those that gain disproportionately in terms of perceived quality of their output as a result of international collaboration. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.