A study of trends in groundwater research in South and Southeast Asian countries in the past five decades has found that Anna University with 207 articles ranks second.
The National Geophysical Research Institute with 245 articles has been ranked first. The Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, with 174 articles, comes third.
The study by researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, on “Trends in groundwater research development in the South and Southeast Asian Countries: a 50-year bibliometric analysis (1970–2020)“ found that it is only recently that developing countries had been writing about groundwater and the various issues pertaining to its overuse, recharge and contamination.
Researchers Meeta Gupta and Pennan Chinnasamy, whose article has been published in the international peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Pollution Research, analysed 7,895 documents and found that India was the most productive country in the specific field.
The researchers said keywords such as groundwater quality, availability, suitability, recharge and management were increasingly cropping up in the documents they studied. When it came to international collaboration, researchers preferred their counterparts in the U.S.
“An increasing trend for studies from developing countries like China and India have been witnessed in the last decade. Studies relating to groundwater depletion and sustainable management showed increasing trends over the 40 years period,” the authors said and added that world over the number of annual groundwater-related journals were only 80 in 1970 by 2020 it had jumped to 3,930.
The authors’ calculation of h-index to evaluate the research performance of an author, institute and the country found that Elango L. of Anna University had the highest output with 75 articles and a h-index of around 25. Prof. Elango is the head of the Department of Geology. Last year, the list of top 2% scientists in 2020 in their field of specialisation by Stanford University had included Prof. Elango and R. Velraj, Vice-Chancellor.
Prof. Elango said he had begun writing research articles from the 1990s.
Only one woman
The study revealed that there was just one woman researcher among the top 20 most productive authors (K. Brindha), calling for more efforts to nurture young women researchers, and encourage and support senior women researchers to reduce the gender imbalance.
The authors suggested more emphasis on organic contaminants in water since most countries in South and Southeast Asia are agro-based.
