Indian Electronic Theses and Dissertations~Indian Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Shodhganga, a platform for improving quality of research in Indian Universities

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Indian Electronic Theses and Dissertations~Indian Electronic Theses and Dissertations: Shodhganga, a platform for improving quality of research in Indian Universities

Description

In India there are 744 Universities which offer Graduate Degrees, Post Graduate Degrees and other relevant courses. 50% of the Universities are awarding PhDs based on the research conducted by scholars/academicians under the supervision of PhD guides who are generally Professors, Scientists etc. There was no attempt at national level in India to digitise or keep archives of PhD theses in one platform before this ETD initiative as two universities initiated the digitisation process of Theses at their respective universities. "Shodhganga" is the first initiative in India to provide a platform for research scholars to deposit their PhD theses and make it available to the entire scholarly community in open access mode. As such, Shodhganga set-up by the INFLIBNET Centre, an IUC of UGC, Min. of HRD, Govt. of India is standardised as a repository in the nation by hosting more than 83000 full text theses from more than 250 Universities.The word "Shodh" originates from Sanskrit and stands for research and discovery Ganga is a popular river with its root in Indian culture and civilization.Universities are encouraged to sign an MoU with INFLIBNET Centre for joining Shodhganga, subsequently, 270+, universities came forward to sign the MoU and contribute to the repository. CFTIs (Centrally Funded Technical Institutes) like IITs, IIMs, NITs, etc. are also directed by Min of HRD to deposit their research output in order to make Shodhganga as a National portal of theses and Shodhgangotri with synopses.Signatory Universities which sign MoU on Shodhganga with INFLIBNET Centre usually get financial assistance from the UGC for digitization of back lists of theses, funds for setting-up of ETD Laboratory and getting access to plagiarism detection software.Shodhganga portal has unique features and functionalities such as (i) Open access repository of Indian theses for world wide access, (ii) Customized ingestion interface for ease of submission of theses using DSpace,(iii) Integration with Theses Database of IndCat (with 2.66 Lacs bibliographic data), (iv) Visually linked browser;(v) Multi-lingual support for theses hosted in the repository. Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Sanskrit, Malayalam, Urdu, Marathi already enabled and many other features for easy navigation through the theses.There are different discovery tools to get relevant information and knowledge snippets from the research output in Shodhganga. These tools are categorised into two types viz-a-viz Search and Browse. Seaching enable the user to do simple search witha word or sentence, advance search with boolean operators, subject wise search basedon WoS subjects and LoC subjects, and Google API to find information from the theses' content.Strategy, design, workflow, status, growth and use of Indian ETD repository is discussed in the poster which highlight the efforts made by INFLIBNET as well as UGC for bringing quality in Indian Research through the project called Shodhganga.\n

Date

2016