Article · Volume 10, Issue 1 · pp. 130–134

Is Sci-Hub Increasing Visibility of Indian Research Papers? An Analytical Evaluation

Vivek Kumar Singh¹, Satya Swarup Srichandan¹, Sujit Bhattacharya²

¹Department of Computer Science, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, INDIA.
²CSIR-National Institute of Science Technology and Development Studies, New Delhi, INDIA.

Abstract

Sci-Hub, founded by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011 in Kazakhstan has, over the years, emerged as a very popular source for researchers to download scientific papers. It is believed that Sci-Hub contains more than 76 million academic articles. However, recently three foreign academic publishers (Elsevier, Wiley and American Chemical Society) have f iled a lawsuit against Sci-Hub and LibGen before the Delhi High Court and prayed for complete blocking these websites in India. It is in this context, that this paper attempts to f ind out how many Indian research papers are available in Sci-Hub and who downloads them. The citation advantage of Indian research papers available on Sci-Hub is analysed, with results confirming that such an advantage do exist.

Keywords: Indian Research; Indian Science; Black Open Access; Open Access; Sci-Hub

The full text of this article is available as a PDF. Open the PDF.