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Private hospitals in India have negligible research output though they deal with 60% of patients. A study of research at Indian hospitals during the 5-year period from January 2021 to December 2025 also found that nearly all hospitals without medical colleges produced fewer than 10 publications annually.The study published in the latest issue of the Journal of Medical Evidence of the BMJ (British Medical Journal) group looked at the number of publications included in Scopus, PubMed and Google Scholar.In the period studied, the average number of publications by the top 50 private hospitals in India without medical colleges attached was 242. In the same period, the average number of publications by the top 50 Indian hospitals with medical colleges was 1,530.The latter list was topped by AIIMS, Delhi (6,932) and CMC, Vellore (5,333).In comparison, the average research output of the top 10 medical colleges in China was over 16,000 with Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine and Peking University Health Science Centre topping the list; in the US, the average was almost 14,500, with Harvard and Johns Hopkins topping the list, and in the UK it was 13,500 with University of Oxford Medical Sciences Division and University College, London Medical School topping the list. Mayo Clinic in the US produces 8,000 papers annually, which is more than the entire Indian private sector. Indian healthcare is now dominated by private hospitals many of which are controlled by large corporate houses whose main purpose is making a profit for its shareholders, so education and research is not a priority, observed the study.“This study confirms that in spite of their dealing with most of the population, doctors in private hospitals in India do little research. There is a neglect of the enormous data that can be accessed from Indian patients going to the majority of Indian hospitals. This may be due to lack of incentive, absence of electronic hardware or priorities which are mainly commercial,” stated the study.According to the study, there were 49,000 Indian medical institutions of which 800 were attached to medical colleges. Although India is fourth in the world in the quantity of research publications after the US, China and UK, its quality, as assessed by the number of citations it receives, drops it down to ninth. This means that the papers are not referred to and do not make a major impact on the world stage, stated the study conducted by Dr Samiran Nundy and Dr Parmanand Tiwari from Delhi’s Sir Ganga Ram Hospital.Research and publication are among the major hallmarks of good medical institutions and there is evidence that those which produce high quality research also provide better patient care. “The quality and quantity of research output is also a major factor in ranking medical institutions all over the world including the well-known US News and World Report as well as the National Institute Ranking Framework of India,” pointed out the study.
