R. D. Goel in his write-up (Curr. Sci., 2001, 81, 627) laments over the nonpublication of top-class research findings in Indian journals in spite of huge expenditure (amounting to about 50 billion rupees annually) on research and development. He has attributed this to 'the malpractices by administrators and higher authorities of research institutes and universities of India'. The following views are in response to the said correspondence. Knowledge being universal, research publications should be assessed through objective universal parameters like 'citation counts', 'impact factors', etc. rather than through local factors like 'Indian', 'State', 'Departmental' journals. It is a matter of regret that the impact factor of Indian journals is abysmally low. This is possibly because of the non-publication of 'top-class research findings' having potential for high citation counts on the one hand and publication of many 'junk papers', on the other. Referring to the decline in the quality of research in India Kalshian states, 'In the entire history of CSIR, only three out of over 20,000 papers published by its scientists have been cited more than 100 times against a world average of one out of every 250'.
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