Scientometric Analysis and Visualization of Solar Physics Research in India

ABSTRACT

We analyzed scientific production of the solar physics research community over the past two decades in India. Scientometric techniques, especially the literature growth models, coauthorship, co-occurrence of keywords, citation, co-citation and bibliographic coupling are used for analysis by using the R program and VOS Viewer. Highly cited papers, prolific authors and journals are identified. The results of this study confess that the scientific literature on Solar Physics in India had grown exponentially with an annual growth rate of about 8.90% during the above mentioned period. Astrophysical Journal and Solar Physics were the most productive journals contributing 34.92% of the total publications. Sun: corona, Sun: magnetic fields and Sun: activity are the most frequently used keywords. United States and Germany are the most frequent international collaborating nations. About 91% of the published papers are multi-authored and only 9% of them are single authored. The mean relative growth rate and doubling time for India`s publication output is 0.19 and 4.9, respectively.

KEYWORDS:

• Scientometrics
• Visualization
• Solar Physics
• coauthorship analysis
• Citation Analysis
• Bibliographical coupling
• VOS Viewer

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. K. Nagaraju, Solar physicist (Indian Institute of Astrophysics, India) for his valuable comments and constructive suggestions significantly helped in improving the quality of this paper.

Conflicts of interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest.