The “science-society connect” deals with “transferring the benefits of scientific work to meet existing and emerging societal needs”. In other words, it talks about taking the science to the society so that the society can benefit from scientific research and scientific temper can be inculcated in citizens. The “science-science connect” refers to “sharing of ideas and resources within the knowledge ecosystem”. Though traditionally, science communication happened using journals and conferences but with the penetration of social media, it has grown beyond these boundaries. Therefore, the use of social media for diffusion of scholarly communication into the society has drawn interest across the world. This work presents an exploratory analysis of effectiveness of Twitter as a medium for diffusion of scholarly communication beyond science-science networks.

The international university rankings are now increasingly used for various purposes, including for funding decisions. Various stakeholders trust ranking assessments which are based on narrow set of criteria namely teaching, research, knowledge transfer, global outlook. However, the role of university in the contemporary scenario have evolved to include societal functions. This paper presents an analysis on the need for updating the ranking frameworks in the context of changing functions of the Universities. In depth literature review and thorough study of popular ranking frameworks (QS, THE and ARWU) were utilized for identifying areas whose inclusion may be beneficial towards addressing the new university functions. The study presents a case for inclusion of five criterion to expand the scope of university ranking framework besides their usual criticism.

Institutional performance assessment is one of the major challenges for various stakeholders including national and institutional policymakers. Existing popular approaches to performance measurement rely on various factors besides research output, which have been criticized on various grounds. In this work, we present a sciento-text framework to assess the core competency/expertise of an institution at two levels: a broad thematic level, based on WoS subject categories, and a finer thematic level based on indexed keywords. The performance measures namely x_d- index and x-index are used for assessment at broad and fine thematic levels, respectively. While national policymakers can make use of x_d- index for the enhancement of national scholarly ecosystem, institutional policymakers and other stakeholders of the institution can make benefit from the wholistic usage of the framework to work for improving its broader expertise diversity as well as enhancing its fine level expertise within suitable disciplines.

Collaborative research has become an integral part of any flourishing academic or industrial ecosystem. Collaboration is not only associated with higher research productivity but has also been found to be positively correlated with impact. Some recent studies have revealed steady and universal increase in academic collaborations, however, several important aspects like country-wide variation of collaboration dynamics and effect of collaboration on productivity at global and national level, etc., are not analysed. This paper attempts to bridge this research gap by analysing the global research publication data for the last five decades. The results show a rise in research collaboration globally, though with varying patterns of domestic and international collaboration. The dynamics of collaboration at international level is analysed and the boost in productivity for various countries is computed, indicating varying effects/ dependence of countries in international research collaboration.