The evaluation of Indian cancer research, 1990---2010

Cancer research outputs in India have expanded greatly in recent years, with some concomitant increase in their citation scores. Part of the increase in output is attributable to greater coverage in the Web of Science of Indian journals, which are more clinical than international ones, and much less often cited. Other measures of esteem have also increased, such as the percentage of reviews and the immediacy with which Indian cancer articles are cited. Most of the output came from just nine of the 35 Indian states and Union Territories, led by New Delhi and Maharashtra. The distribution of the amount of research by cancer site correlates moderately positively with the relative disease burden, with mouth (head and neck) cancer (often caused by the chewing of tobacco or areca, betel or paan) causing the highest number of deaths and also being well researched. We also analysed the articles by type of research, with articles in genetics and chemotherapy being the most numerous. For articles published in 2009---2010, data were available on the funding acknowledgements, and we found, as expected, that articles in clinical subjects were less often supported by external funding than ones in basic research. The major source of support was the Government of India, with relatively small contributions from charities and industry, unlike the situation in the UK and other western European countries.