India's Social Science Trajectory: A Curated Open Dataset for Research and Policy Analysis

The dataset titled India's Social Science Trajectory: A Curated Open Dataset for Research and Policy Analysis provides a longitudinal and multi-dimensional overview of the Indian social science research ecosystem spanning the period from 1948 to 2025, i.e., the post-Independence era. It is designed to support empirical investigations into research capacity, output growth, scholarly integrity, and infrastructural development. The dataset includes several interlinked components. First, the Activity Index (AI) is presented for each year between 1948 and 2024, measuring India's relative research activity compared to the global average. This metric is computed by normalizing India’s annual publication share against its overall share during the study period and comparing it with corresponding global figures. Second, the Relative Growth Rate (RGR) component presents a comparative analysis of publication growth for India, the global average, and the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) using the standard logarithmic growth formula.
A third component includes historical PhD statistics, offering counts of doctoral theses awarded in social sciences from 1930 to 2025. This provides insight into long-term capacity building in higher education. A fourth module presents period-wise publication output, tabulating the total and average annual research publications from India and ICSSR across seven major temporal segments. Fifth, the dataset features data on retractions in Indian social sciences, derived from the Retraction Watch database. It includes both a subject-wise breakdown of the 382 identified retracted papers and a year-wise time series analysis covering 2004 to 2025, enabling scrutiny of research misconduct trends.
Sixth, the dataset includes a consolidated list of 41 Indian social science journals indexed in the 2025 JCR. Each journal entry provides metadata such as title, publisher, ISSN, WoS category, JCR edition (SCIE, SSCI), JIF, JCI, and quartile rank (Q1–Q4). The majority of these journals are clustered in the Q3 and Q4 categories, reflecting the persistent challenges of international visibility, citation performance, and editorial capacity in India’s social science publishing landscape.
Additionally, the dataset offers a visual representation of the socio-technical information infrastructure that supports social science research in India. This systems diagram illustrates the interconnections among funding sources, institutional arrangements, data repositories, and knowledge dissemination pathways. Complementing this, a conceptual model of a proposed Open Research Information (ORI) system outlines a future-oriented, PID-enabled, multilingual, FAIR-aligned national infrastructure for responsible research assessment and open knowledge dissemination. Finally, the dataset includes a comprehensive list of India’s Global South collaboration partners in social science publishing, based on Scopus co-authorship data from 1948 to 2024.