Analysis of the Academic Genealogy Graph in an Indian ETD Repository

This repository accompanies the paper:

On the banks of Shodhganga: analysis of the academic genealogy graph of an Indian ETD repository Dhananjay Kumar, Plaban Kumar Bhowmick, Sumana Dey, Debarshi Kumar Sanyal Scientometrics, Volume 128, pages 3879–3914 (2023) Published: 18 May 2023 · https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04728-z

Overview

Academic genealogy graphs capture information about the lineage of researchers, encode how knowledge flows from advisors to protégés, and shed light on the birth and evolution of disciplines.

In this work, we study the academic genealogy network (AGN) in Shodhganga, the Indian Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) database. We disambiguated the names of the researchers in Shodhganga and constructed the Shodhganga-AGN, which we analyzed using genealogical metrics proposed in the literature — both general graph-topology metrics and metrics specific to academic genealogy networks — to unravel several patterns in India's higher education system.

Key Findings

• The metrics studied were able to identify the institutes and researchers that have played a significant role in the development of the Indian higher education system.
• The largest connected component of Shodhganga-AGN consists of 1,356 researchers and 1,437 advisor–advisee relationships.
• This component is dominated by researchers from science and is affiliated primarily with three institutions.
• We studied recurring subgraph patterns (supervision motifs) within the genealogy network and found that most subgraph instances connect researchers within a single institution or subject.

Overall, the study offers a detailed, insightful analysis of the academic genealogy of researchers indexed in Shodhganga, capturing the decades-old research ecosystem of India as expressed through formal advisor–advisee relationships in Indian universities.

Methodology

1. Name disambiguation — Resolve duplicate/ambiguous researcher names in raw Shodhganga records into unique researcher identities.
2. Graph construction — Build the Shodhganga-AGN as a directed graph of advisor → advisee relationships.
3. Metric analysis — Apply topological metrics from general graph theory and genealogy-network-specific metrics (e.g., fecundity, lineage depth, genealogical indices) to the constructed graph.
4. Subgraph/motif analysis — Identify recurring supervision patterns (subgraph structures) within the network.

Keywords: Academic genealogy graph · Researcher name disambiguation · Indian thesis repository · Shodhganga ETD

Authors' affiliations:

• Dhananjay Kumar, Plaban Kumar Bhowmick — Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur
• Sumana Dey — Mindtree, Kolkata
• Debarshi Kumar Sanyal — Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata

Citation

If you use this work, please cite:

@article{kumar2023shodhganga,
  title   = {On the banks of Shodhganga: analysis of the academic genealogy graph of an Indian {ETD} repository},
  author  = {Kumar, Dhananjay and Bhowmick, Plaban Kumar and Dey, Sumana and Sanyal, Debarshi Kumar},
  journal = {Scientometrics},
  volume  = {128},
  pages   = {3879--3914},
  year    = {2023},
  doi     = {10.1007/s11192-023-04728-z}
}