India’s research paradox: Leading in published papers, but low on citations and patents to universities

India ranks third in the world by sheer volume of publications per year, but only 19th by h-index, the standard measure of how much research actually gets read, used, and cited by others. | iStock/Getty Images Between 2020 and 2025, Indian researchers published more research papers in Scopus-indexed journals — 1.6 million of them — than any other country in the world, ahead of the United States, the United Kingdom and China.

Some private universities saw their gross paper output explode by over 760% in five years. University patent filings multiplied four times, from 11,150 in 2020–21 to 45,776 in 2024–25, with a handful of private universities that have, in recent years, collectively out-filed even the IITs in sheer volume.

India has never looked more productive in academic research, on paper. But here’s the catch. India ranks third in the world by sheer volume of publications per year, but only 19th by h-index, the standard measure of how much research actually gets read, used, and cited by others.

Our aggregate h-index stands at 925; America’s is 3,213. We publish at a scale nobody else can match, and get cited at a scale a much smaller club of nations manages. Patents tell an even less flattering story. As per the Indian Patents Office, patent grants in 2024-25 dropped by 67% from the previous year.

While the overall grant rate for applications in the last 5 years averages 24%, they are as low as 3% for universities. Worse, the “working rate” — the share of granted patents actually put to commercial use — has fallen from 12.1% in 2022-23 to just 1.6 % in 2024-25.

The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) rewards a hefty 30% weightage to Research and Professional Practice, which includes publications and patents – applications filed and granted – without penalising institutions for failing to move from one stage to the next.

This creates a skewed incentive structure where institutions are rewarded for volume, regardless of subsequent results. In the QS World Rankings 2026, India had its best showing yet: 54 institutions on the list, up from just 11 in 2015, making it the fourth most represented country in the world, behind only the United States, Britain and China.

Eight Indian universities now rank in the world’s top 100 for citations per faculty. IIT Delhi is India’s highest-placed institution overall, at 123rd globally, with IIT Bombay and IIT Madras close behind — IIT Madras alone jumped 47 places in a single year, from 227th to 180th.

Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings 2026 paint a far more sobering picture. Despite India fielding more than 120 ranked institutions overall — its largest-ever showing — just four Indian universities make it into THE’s global top 500, against 11 for India in QS’s equivalent list.

The Indian Institute of Science, India’s undisputed leader, sits in the 201–250 band; the rest trail well behind. This is where things get uncomfortable. India now ranks third in the world for outright retractions, behind only the United States and China, and our retraction rate has more than doubled in a decade, from 1.5 per thousand papers in 2012 to 3.5 in 2022.

One comprehensive study counted 3,244 Indian-affiliated retractions over two decades, six in ten of them from private institutions, with fake peer review, fabricated data and plagiarism topping the list of reasons given.

And this is not confined to the usual suspects. Some of the premier centrally funded institutions are also a party to it. How did a nation blessed with extraordinary intellectual capital, a demographic dividend of millions of aspirational youths, and historic scientific triumphs like Chandrayaan find itself trapped in this ‘paper fortress’?

Part of the problem is structural. The University Grants Commission (UGC), India’s principal higher-education regulator, is fundamentally a grants-disbursing body and does not have the statutory power to control these things.

The U.K. built an independent Research Integrity Office back in 2006; Denmark has a statutory Board on Research Misconduct with real investigative teeth. Feeding much of this is a compensation culture Indian higher education has run for well over a decade, largely without adequate checks.

Most of the private universities routinely pay cash incentives — up to lakhs of rupees — to the faculty for every indexed paper, patent grant or conference presentation- uncapped in aggregate, with little independent verification of journal legitimacy or genuine co-authorship.

Combine that with predatory publishers charging as little as $30 a paper and organised “paper mills” offering ghost-written manuscripts with guaranteed publications. Nowhere is this cultural distortion clearer than in the stark contrast between India’s two most prestigious institutional systems: the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs).

At most of the IIMs, faculty receive lucrative, direct cash incentives up to ₹10 lakh for every paper published in top-tier journals. The economic rationale was to offset the opportunity cost of lucrative corporate consulting and Management Development Programs.