On the banks of Shodhganga: analysis of the academic genealogy graph of an Indian ETD repository

Academic genealogy graphs capture information about the lineage of researchers, encode how knowledge flows from advisors to proteges, and shed light on the birth and evolution of disciplines. In this paper, we study the academic genealogy graph/network (AGN) in Shodhganga which is the Indian Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) database. We have disambiguated the names of the researchers in Shodhganga and constructed the Shodhganga-AGN, which we have analyzed with topological metrics proposed in the literature on general graphs as well as that on genealogy networks. The metrics studied have been 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 1356 researchers and 1437 advisor–advisee relationships. The component is dominated by researchers from science and is affiliated primarily with three institutions. We have also studied subgraphs in the genealogy network to identify supervision patterns, and found that most of the subgraph instances connect researchers within a single institution or subject. Thus, our study is a detailed insightful analysis of the academic genealogy of researchers indexed in Shodhganga, and captures the decades-old research ecosystem of India, as expressed through the formal advisor–advisee relationships in Indian universities.