Evaluation of research in India - are we doing it right?

The evaluation of performance in scientific research at any level - whether at the individual, institutional, research council or country level - is not easy. Traditionally, research evaluation at the individual and institutional levels has depended largely on peer opinion, but with the rapid growth of science over the last century and the availability of databases and scientometric techniques, quantitative indicators have gained importance. Both peer review and metrics are subject to flaws, more so in India because of the way they are used.

Adopting ORCID as a unique identifier will benefit all involved in scholarly communication.

ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a non- profit, community-driven effort to create and maintain a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. Together with other persistent identifiers for scholarly works such as digital object identifiers (DOIs) and identifiers for organizations, ORCID makes research more discoverable. It helps ensure that one's grants, publications and outputs are correctly attributed.