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CHAPTER 13

Databases and Research Metrics

Manmohan Gupta

Introduction

It is widely acknowledged that the 21st century is being driven by innovation and knowledge
creation, which are also the key drivers of the economic development for any country as already
borne out by the last two decades of the 21st century. Generating, storing, and to meaningfully use
the data related to research outputs are crucial ingredients for innovation and knowledge creation
in any country. Data management and data mining tools, play an important role in the present
context, which is related to the scholarly research activity and the related conundrums created by
the exponentially rising sources of scholarly academic literature. We are particularly interested
in the scholarly literature stored in many well-known and ever-increasing databases for storing
scholarly literature.
After the Second World War, the world witnessed an unprecedented growth of research and
academic activity, not limited to the field of science. This presented unprecedented challenges on
all fronts of academic activity, from the human resource management of institutions of higher
education and research to the deeper issues of ethics in the academics. In fact, this is further
complicated by the fact that most academic activity has undergone transition from pursuits to
professional activity. When the number of people involved in research and related activity are
limited, a peer group-led approach is very practical and tangible in evaluating research output,
among other parameters, of any individual and the related issue of ethics also is essentially related
to the integrity of a peer group. However, things become complicated when there is exponential
increase in the persons involved in such activity and there is a mind-boggling output of highly
diversified research. By a rough estimate, at present more than two million scholarly documents are
created every year. Storage, documentation, and accessibility of these exponentially rising number
of documents is undoubtedly a gigantic problem.

With the proliferation of data, it becomes important to find quality markers for publications and
journals, which are ever-increasing in number. The questions related to multidimensional research
and collaborations have also opened the issues related to the quality of institutional contributions as
well as that of the country. This has also complicated the matter of objectively assessing the quality
and contributions of a given author, particularly in large multinational collaborations. Although there
is no foolproof objective way to quantify the research contribution of an individual or an institution,
one can attempt to reach as far as possible in achieving this goal.
In such a mind-boggling situation, research evaluation is continuously proving to be a tough job.
With the limitations of peer reviews when the number of cases become large, one has to supplement
it with other objective means. The objective here is to understand the basic features of databases
and the related quality markers. We discuss the most popular databases in detail, which researchers
and scholars use as well as we briefly discuss the parameters, which measure the quality of research
journals as well as the scientific outputs of individuals and institutions.

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