Subbiah Arunachalam

Information for Research in Developing Countries — Information Technology, a Friend or Foe?

The difference between the advanced and developing countries in the matter of access to information for research has been continually increasing. The advent of the Internet and electronic sources of information has not only exacerbated the gap but also led to the exclusion of developing country researchers from taking part as equal partners in publishing, refereeing, and in international collaboration. If handled imaginatively, the very same technologies can help bridge the information gap between the rich and the poor countries and help improve research productivity worldwide. Many initiatives that are already in place are described and suggestions are given on steps to be taken by developing country researchers.

Information and knowledge in the age of electronic communication: a developing country perspective

The current digital revolution, the fourth information revolution in history after the invention of writing, the book and printing, has serious potential to exacerbate the gulf between the North and the South. As has been observed in the USA, even within an affluent country, with inadequate policy interventions, information technology not only widens the digital divide but also deepens the racial ravine. The implications of the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) for science and scholarship and for development are examined. The maldistribution of access to ICTs - telephones, computers, networks, Internet, bandwidth and electronic journals - is bound to make it even more difficult for the developing countries to contribute to, and take advantage of, knowledge in the sciences. These countries will get further marginalised. As suggested by Bruce Alberts, President of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, knowledge dissemination structures need to be put in place which are not entirely based on commerce. Innovative models, such as the community access model of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, which attempts to transform the otherwise divisive information technologies into allies in the equity movement, can make a difference to the life of the rural poor. The Swaminathan model emphasises delivering locale-specific knowledge that the people actually need and can use to improve their lot. The model follows a bottom-up approach, involving the user community as partners right from the beginning, emphasises knowledge delivery and uses technology - a hybrid wired and wireless network - only when it is necessary to achieve its major goal of knowledge delivery.

Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development

Leslie Chan and colleagues discuss the value of open access not just for access to health information, but also for transforming structural inequity in current academic reward systems and for valuing scholarship from the South.

Reaching the unreached: how can we use information and communication technologies to empower the rural poor in the developing world through enhanced access to relevant information?

Often funding agencies and donor governments face the question should they support information and communication technology (ICT) activities in their development projects. Should the money be invested in computers and communication devices or will it be better spent on food, shelter, health and education? The choice need not be ‘either/or’. If used intelligently and innovatively, ICTs can form an integral component of developmental projects, as is shown by the award-winning Information Village project of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation. The important point to remember is that one does not have to use technology because it is there, but one uses it if there is a genuine advantage. In any developmental programme, people and their contexts should decide how one goes about implementing developmental interventions. The needs of the people and the best means to satisfy them should determine the whole programme. Often ICT-based developmental projects do not bring in the expected results because of undue emphasis placed on technology. Against this background, the factors that led to the success of the Pondicherry experience are analysed.

Physics research in Israel—A preliminary bibliometric analysis

The impact of physics research carried out in Israel on the international literature is assessed from data on publication and citation counts. We have considered in this analysis all papers published from Israel and covered under six of the ten major sections of INSPECs Physics Abstracts, January-June 1977 (covering condensed matter physics, nuclear and particle physics, atomic and molecular physics and biophysics and physical chemistry) as well as citations to these papers as seen from five annual editions of Science Citation Index, 1977-1981. An analysis of these data permits us to identify: (i) areas of research in which Israel is strong, (ii) highly cited publications, (iii) the distribution of citations over the years, and (iv) how quickly the papers get cited. Israel accounts for less than 1% of the worlds physics publications, but undeniably physics done in Israel is an integral part of the mainstream of world physics. Israeli physicists place almost all their work in foreign journals, most of them published from the United States, the Nether lands and the United Kingdom. Many of these journals have a good standing as seen from their high impact factors and immediacy indices. Nearly all papers in our sample have originated in eight institutions, indicating that Israel is free from the common Third World malady of spreading the butter of R&D budget too thinly. Overall, Israeli physics appears to be productive in condensed matter physics, nuclear physics and atomic and molecular physics. However, chemical physics tops the list if one considers both the number of papers published and the cognitive impact these papers have had. Two areas where Israel did not publish much and yet had a few publica tions of high impact are: (i) special theories, interaction models and particle systematics, and (ii) biophysics. Surprisingly for a nation interested in both the military and civilian applications of nuclear energy, Israels publications in nuclear physics are not as well cited as her publications in many other subfields of physics.

Publication & citation patterns in the literature of a high metabolism area: The case of superconductivity in 1970:

From an analysis of bibliographic data on 255 randomly chosen documents on superconductivity (1969-1970) and the citations to them in the international literature over the twelve- year period 1970-1981, we have attempted to identify the geographical origin, language, and journal-wise distributions of the papers, the citedness of these papers and the distribution of citations as a time series for the more often cited papers. We have also verified some of our conclusions based on publication data alone by checking with an analysis of the 1479 supercon ductivity documents covered in Physics Abstracts 1981. English is the lingua franca of superconductivity research. Not only was more than 85% of the 251 non-patent publications in our 1970 sample in English, but even among the 10% in Russian most became available in English translation soon after their original publication. The United States of America, the Soviet Union and Japan led the field with at least 101, 32 and 20 publications respectively; however, not one of the papers from the USSR and Japan could win more than 24 citations in the 12-year period following its publication, whereas at least 22 US papers were cited 25 times or more. In all, the 251 non-patent papers received 2526 citations for an average of about 10 citations per paper. There were 63 papers which were not cited even once; at the other extreme, 3 papers were cited more than 100 times each and 20 papers received between 30 and 100 citations. The distribution of the citations to the 23 highly cited (at least 30 times in 12 years) papers as a time series shows a distinct pattern of an initial stage of rapid rise in citations per year followed by a plateau and a subsequent decline. With a larger sample, we believe that it should be possible to discern sciento metrically valuable patterns in the time series data on citation distributions. The limited data that we have corroborate the point made by Narin, Frame and Carpenter that Soviet papers published in Soviet journals are predominantly quoted in Soviet journals and papers written by Soviet authors, but published in non-Soviet journals, are quoted largely in non-Soviet journals.

Science in a small country at a time of globalisation: domestic and international collaboration in new biology research in Israel

From an analysis of papers indexed in three years of Biochemistry and Biophysics Citation Index (1992, 1995 and 1998), it is found that 103 institutions in Israel have published 4,112 papers in more than 990 journals and 64 non-journal sources published from 27 countries. More than 16% of papers have appeared in journals with an impact factor (IF) higher than 7.00 and an equal fraction of papers have appeared in journals with an IF of less than 1.00. The sum of the IFs of the journals in which papers have been published has been used as a rough measure to quantify each institution’s research contribution. Hebrew University, the Weizmann Institute and Tel Aviv University are the institutions publishing the largest number of papers, while Rehovot and Jerusalem are the leading cities. Journal of Biological Chemistry , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - USA , FEBS Letters and Biochemistry are the journals most often used by Israeli researchers to publish their work. To overcome the problems of conducting world-class research in a small country, Israel uses collaboration with overseas laboratories to great advantage. More than 42% of papers in the sample involve international collaboration; half of them with laboratories in the USA and some with Germany, France, the UK and Canada. Over 10% of papers have resulted from domestic collaboration. In general, internationally collaborated papers are published in higher-impact journals, but domestically collaborated papers more often appear in lower-impact journals than single-institution papers. While the USA remains the most important partner of Israel, papers co-authored with French and UK collaborators raise the IF value of Israeli contributions more than those with other partner countries.

Sophisticated science in a small country: a scientometric analysis of superconductivity research in Israel

Small countries practising science rarely graduate to the level of performing quality research in sophisticated areas. Viewed on this background, an analysis of 130 papers on superconductivity published by Israeli researchers and indexed in Physics Abstracts 1971-1982 reveal that Israel does pretty well in this area. Prolific institutions and authors have been identified as well as journals most often used, highly cited papers, etc. Many of the papers appeared in high impact international journals, with Physical Review B (26), Journal of Low Temperature Physics (11) and Solid State Communications (10) leading the field. Among the five institutions active in the area, Tel Aviv University (68) accounts for more than half of Israels publication output. Hebrew University (32) and Tech nion Institute of Technology (22) are the other major centres of research in superconductivity. Five of the 130 papers have won more than 20 citations each up to 1982, and 22 papers more than 10 citations. Israeli papers in superconductivity seem to belong to the mainstream literature in the area as seen from their decent citation record, which is better than that of Canada and almost close to that of the USA. Most of these papers are theoretical/computational and about 30% of them are experi mental.

Human population growth : Rich countries need education on resource conservation

Because rich countries remain the main source of new knowledge and new technologies responsibility for finding paths to sustainability rests mainly with them” Well said. Unfortunately the rich countries or at least the dominant sections in rich countries have not yet learned to view the world as a single whole. The world continues to be a space to be dominated. It used to be domination by conquering and colonizing now it is domination through unfair economic and trade agreements. National self-interest takes precedence over global good. If corporations in the rich countries do things that exacerbate the divide between the rich and poor and make sustainability increasingly difficult to attain individuals in those countries add their bit by consuming scarce natural resources at an alarming rate. Development experts talk of the great importance of education in the poor countries. I think that educating the rich countries about the need to reduce consumption and conserve resources is equally if not more important. Without that it would be futile to expect that rich countries to find paths to sustainability. (full text)

Science on the Periphery: Bridging the Information Divide

Scientists in developing countries have access to only a tiny fraction of the information they need, and their own contribution to science is hardly noticed by others. It is important that these countries strengthen their scientific research and that their scientists become fully integrated members of the worldwide network of science. But, unfortunately, the transformations effected in the conduct of science with the advent of the new information and communication technologies (such as high bandwidth Internet) and the rising cost of subscriptions to journals and secondary services are widening the gulf between the industrialized and developing countries. Ironically, the steep rise in the cost of S&T information has helped developing countries in a way, as it forced scientists and librarians in the advanced countries to think of measures to overcome the ‘serials crisis’ and many of these measures can benefit developing country scientists. This paper looks at doing research in the developing world and how we can harness the new technologies to achieve information equity.