New Delhi: India is among the top 13 countries in terms of published scientific research papers, according to a recent study by the Science Watch team of Thomson ISI.

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"India published 211,063 papers as against 422,993 by China (more than twice the number of papers as India's). India had 694 papers in the most cited 1 percent of papers whereas China had 2,189 papers in this category (more than three times the number of such papers from India)," said Subbiah Arunachalam, a long-term campaigner for enhancing the impact of Indian research.

Only 0.33 percent of Indian papers could get into the one percent of most cited papers, whereas for China and South Korea the figure was 0.52 percent, noted Arunachalam.

"Apart from encouraging our scientists to do better quality work and providing them better facilities and a conducive environment, it is necessary to increase the visibility of Indian research publications, for example through placing our papers in institutional repositories or publishing them in open access journals," he argued.

In terms of total papers in all fields from 1996 to 2006, India ranked 11th, ahead of South Korea and Taiwan. Its share was under one-tenth of the US, the leader which had almost three million papers published in this period.