#44 Counting Papers: How India’s Research Metrics Fail Academia
Today's Policy Mandala unpacks how flawed research evaluation frameworks and rankings including NIRF have created a distorted academic incentive ecosystem in India, one that push numbers over quality.
In 2025, India earned an uncomfortable distinction. Retraction Watch, a global database that monitors research papers, named six Indian universities amongst the world's ten institutions with the highest number of retracted research papers.
Before we proceed, let’s understand what retractions mean in the academic world. Put simply, a retracted paper is a published research paper that has been formally withdrawn from the academic record because of serious errors, plagiarism or other integrity concerns. More often than not, it reflects academic misconduct.
But today’s Policy Mandala is not about retracted papers. It is about the incentive structure that makes such outcomes increasingly unsurprising.
In this edition, we are de-cluttering the world of research promotion policies in India, how we may have unintentionally incentivised the wrong metrics of research, and how that may be corrected.
To begin with, let’s go back to the case of retracted papers. When a university gets named in such a list as this one, it often points towards deeper institutional issues in research quality and integrity, where publishing a poor research paper may carry fewer consequences than it should.
But why do academicians do it?
Well, the simplest answer is the case of academic incentives.
You see, India, like any other developing nation, is focused on improving the quality of its research ecosystem and has created a system of incentives around the same.
This is primarily done by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), constituted by the Ministry of Education in 2015 to rank higher education institutions across teaching, research, outcomes and perception. NIRF has become a key signal for faculty, students, funders and partners alike, influencing how universities prioritise their efforts. Today, we focus on how it measures research and why we believe that has become a policy problem.
NIRF uses three main parameters. First is the Quantum of Research, measured through the number of published papers, carrying 50% weightage. Second is Citation Count, carrying 25% weightage and measuring the impact/utility of research. Finally, it measures Quality of Research through the quality of the journal where the papers are published, also carrying 25% weightage.
This sounded like a balanced approach to us. That changed after we spoke to academicians, revealing a gap between intent and practice.
We realised these incentives had long been gamed by the very academicians they were meant to evaluate.
For example, the incentive for the quantum of papers has led to a proliferation of poor-quality journals, easing publications while adding little fundamental value to the world in terms of knowledge creation. Similarly, the incentive of citations has led to the practice of self-citations as a way to increase citation counts and, often, the creation of ‘citation rings’ that enable academicians to mutually cite each other’s papers, irrespective of their academic value.
The story now shifts from one of individual or institutional academic misconduct to one of misaligned evaluation frameworks and incentive structures.
These research evaluation frameworks are used to assess both individual researchers and institutions. They influence promotions and career growth for researchers, while shaping rankings, funding, partnerships, faculty recruitment and student attraction for institutions.
Institutions with stronger research metrics are also better positioned to secure grants and special government schemes. Under the Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF), India’s apex research funding body, institutions featuring in the top 25 of the NIRF Overall Rankings over the previous two years are eligible under certain grant categories.
At Policy Mandala, we believe India has unintentionally created a distorted incentive ecosystem in research, one that pressures academics to focus on the number of publications rather than the questions that truly matter.
While writing this edition, we spoke to over 20 professors, including across IITs and IIMs. One concern came up repeatedly: the growing pressure to prioritise paper publications over asking meaningful questions and conducting impactful research. A 2025 study of 252 faculty members in Indian private universities found pressure to publish as a key element shaping motivations.
So, how do we move ahead from here?
First, reduce the weight of absolute publication counts. Instead, reward quality through field-specific multipliers. A paper in a top journal or conference in its discipline should count far more than multiple low-value publications. This would shift incentives from publishing more to publishing better.
The proposed Viksit Bharat Shiksha Adhishthan, a new regulatory body in the making, as announced in 2025, offers an opportunity to rethink how research excellence is measured in India.
China has also begun reforming its research evaluation system by reducing the emphasis on publication counts and encouraging universities to value originality, research quality and real-world impact over simply producing more papers.
Second, metrics must recognise that research takes time to create impact. One simple way to do this is by including papers only after a delay of at least a year. That gives enough time for citations, scrutiny and early signs of impact to emerge.
Third, evaluation systems should flag suspicious journals and malpractice patterns using research-integrity analytics. This is already common among leading research publishers. For example, Clarivate, which maintains one of the world’s largest journal citation databases, suppresses journals for abnormal citation behaviour. Springer Nature, one of the world’s largest academic publishers, uses AI tools to detect irrelevant references, AI-generated content and problematic images. These technologies are almost ready to use and can be directly incorporated into public research rankings.
NIRF has also begun recognising this challenge and has signalled its intent to act by introducing negative marking for retractions in 2025. That is an encouraging start. The next step is to proactively identify patterns that indicate compromised research quality.
We also believe that better policing alone cannot solve a flawed incentive structure. Change in behaviour requires a fundamental change in incentives.
The consequences of getting this wrong extend far. When researchers are rewarded for publishing more instead of solving difficult problems, the nation risks writing mere papers without generating commensurate advances in knowledge, innovation, or technological breakthroughs. In the long run, this weakens India’s ability to emerge as a global leader in science, technology and ideas.
India needs a deeper redesign: reward originality over volume, integrity over optimisation and long-term impact over short-term output. Only then can India become a true knowledge hub for the world.
We will be watching this space closely. Building a great nation requires path-breaking research, and policy is one of its strongest enablers. Ultimately, every evaluation system answers a simple question: what kind of behaviour are we trying to reward?
If India aspires to lead the world in knowledge creation, its research metrics must move beyond publishing more and towards asking the right questions, which truly advance society.
Co-authored by Kumar Shubham, Samridh Joshi & Avdhesh Pathak
