scholarly communication of the vikalpa from 2003-2012: a scientometric analysis

the paper explores the research productivity of the journal vikalpa for the    period of 2003-2012, which is indexed in the ebsco on-line database. various quality aspects of the 437 research articles published in the period were studied. the study elaborates on various aspects of the journal such as year wise distribution of the articles, growth rate of articles, authorship pattern, and degree of the authorship collaboration, distribution of  the contribution by institutions, country wise, length of  the articles and geographical distribution of authors.  the analysis of the data revealed that   average growth rate of literature was 1.07 and moderate degree (.4234) of collaboration was observed.   further, research showed that   average number of authors per paper was 1.7 and single authored research articles constitute maximum to the total research output (57.87%). on an average 43 articles were published in each year during the study period. the maximum number of articles have been contributed by academic institutions. further it is found that the relative growth rate (rgr) of articles was found to be gradually increasing from 0.6931 in the year 2003 to 2.4964 in the year 2012 and correspondingly the values of doubling time of the articles was found to be decreasing from .9998 in the year 2004 to 0.2776 in the year 2012. the study also reveals that india has the largest contributor of literature for vikalpa journal. finally, the research productivity of authors of vikalpa journal does not obey the lotka’s law of scientific productivity.