Ten of India's leading researchers were honored at Thomson Reuters Research Excellence - India Citation Awards 2015 presentation event held at the a glittering ceremony on September, 18 in New Delhi. As per the Intellectual Property and Science business division of Thomson Reuters, the awards represent India's continuing influence on global scientific research.

Dr Soumya Swaminathan, director general, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and secretary, Department of Health Research who was the guest of honor at event, congratulated the awardees. The keynote address was delivered by Dr H Purushotham, chairman and M D, National Research Development Corporation (NRDC).

The India Citation awards study mines scientific research citations within Web of Science - the premier global search and discovery platform to identify most influential researchers in the country.

Out of ten India Citation Awards winners in 2105, three belonged to biosciences. These included Dr A Banerjee- fellow, Royal Society of Chemistry, UK, professor- Biological Chemistry, Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science; Dr A Ramachandran, chairman, Dr A Ramachandran's Diabetes Hospitals president, India Diabetes Research Capital and Dr Rajeev Varshney- director, International Crops Research Institute for the semi-arid tropics, Center of Excellence in Genomics.

Commenting on the awards, Mr Arvind Pachhapur, South Asia head - Intellectual Property and Science and Legal Business, Thomson Reuters mentioned, "India has always been an important contributor to the global research output. The Thomson Reuters India Citation Awards aims to encourage and celebrate excellence in research by objectively identifying highly impactful work."

The scientists under other categories included Dr Vinay Gupta- IUSSTF(Indo-US) University of California Scientist, Physics of Energy Harvesting, CSIR National Physical Laboratory; Dr A K Srivastav, visiting scientist, US Army Laboratory, Maryland, USA, professor- Analytical Chemistry University of Mumbai; Dr Prithwish Tribedy, scientist Variable Energy Cyclotron Center, Kolkata; Dr Rahul Bannerjee, principal scientist, Physical and Materials, Chemistry Division, CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory; Dr S Ramaprabhu-professor, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, Chennai; Dr Swagatam Das, assistant professor, Electronics and Communications, Science unit, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, and Dr Vandana Bhalla- assistant professor, Gurunanak Dev University, Amritsar , Category- Organic Chemistry.

Research methodology for the 2015 Thomson Reuters Research Excellence - India Citation Awards:

â–  Only papers indexed in Thomson Reuters Web of Science database that listed an author address from India were examined.

â– Only papers published in the five-year period 2010-2014 were reviewed.

â– From the identified corpus, a search was made for highly cited papers, defined as papers ranking in the top 1% by citations compared with other papers in the same broad field and of the same publication year.

â– From this analysis, 10 high-impact Indian scientists were identified whose recent papers represented the strongest research performance in their research area in terms or number of highly cited papers and total citations to these highly cited papers.