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This brief communication is the outcome of the prevailing confusion and the role of editors of several prestigious journals published in India in different disciplines of science and social science including the discipline of library and information science. These journals use different Plagiarism Detection Tools (PDTs) or Plagiarism Detection Software (PDS) to assess the similarity score of the submitted manuscript. These PDTs are helpful to avoid questions raised on the academic integrity of the submitted manuscript. For every submission, the editor of the journal generates a similarity report and communicates the results of the similarity index to the scholars verbatim. It is not judicious for the editor of the journal to simply rely on the percentage of similarity index suggested by the PDT. Human intervention is required to rule out the facts by a thorough inspection of every single matching. Also, an acceptable percentage of similarity for a manuscript needs a critical analysis. Based on the set guidelines of the academic regulatory bodies, an acceptable percentage of similarity for a manuscript is considered as minor or level 0 if it is 10%. The present communication draws attention towards this malice as a lot of time of the author/scholar is devoted to incorporate small changes which do not serve any useful purpose to the manuscript and the journal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study examines the publication delay in 10 scholarly journals published by the Indian Academy of Sciences. The study examined 2986 articles published in these ten journals in the years 2014 and 2018. The analysis shows that the publication delay varied with discipline and from one journal to another journal. The highest time delay was for the Proceedings of Mathematical Sciences (PMS) in 2014 as well as in 2018 and lowest for Current Science (7.1 ± 3.2 months) in 2014 and Journal of Chemical Science (JCS) in 2018. The total publication delay varied between (11.1± 5.3 months) and (12.8 ± 7.0 months) in 2014 and 2018, respectively. In most of the journals, the reason for the delay was editorial (delays between receipt of the manuscript and its revision) in 2014 and technical (revision and its later publication) in 2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of primary documentary sources indexed by Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) and Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA) indicates that LISTA indexed 519 and LISA indexed 327 primary documentary sources. These sources mainly are scholarly or academic journals, magazines and trade journals. As proportion of total documentary sources, the share of scholarly journals indexed by LISA was more than LISTA. However, in absolute terms the journals indexed by LISTA were more than LISA. LISTA indexed scholarly journals from 37 countries and LISA indexed scholarly journals from 38 countries. LISA mainly emphasized indexing of scholarly periodicals as compared to LISTA, which also emphasized to index magazines. Of the total 646 scholarly titles indexed by LISTA and LISA, 131 titles were common to both databases. Maximum titles indexed by both the databases were published from USA and UK. Most of these journals were published by commercial publishers. Taylor and Francis Ltd contributed highest number of journals to both the databases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This part of the study highlights the contents of the published articles in terms of various disciplines or sub-disciplines and the bibliometric aspects discussed in these articles. The analysis of 902 papers published by Indian scholars during 1995-2014 indicates that the main focus of bibliometrics/scientometrics is on assessment of science and technology in India in different sub-disciplines including contributions by Indian states and other individual countries followed by bibliometric analysis of individual journals. Papers dealing with bibliometric laws received a low priority as compared to other sub-disciplines of bibliometrics/scientometrics. The analysis of data indicates that the share of theoretical studies using mathematical and statistical techniques which were missing in the earlier period (1970-1994) has increased during 1995-2014. The field of medicine as a discipline received the highest attention as compared to other disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]