During her master’s dissertation, a student developed what she believed was an original idea: adding a new variable to her model, supported by a clear theoretical justification. Her supervisor instead gave her a “base paper” to replicate. When she asked what would make the dissertation original, she was told that changing the region or period would constitute a sufficient research gap.
In another case, a student proposed testing a macroeconomic phenomenon in India. Similar research had been conducted in China, but the proposal was discouraged because no supporting Indian literature existed. The absence of prior work, which might have justified the inquiry, became a reason not to pursue it.
Experiences differ across disciplines and institutions, and two cases cannot establish the prevalence of a practice. They nevertheless illustrate a recognisable tendency: originality is sometimes reduced to finding a readily defensible gap in the literature, often through a minor change in geography, period or variables.
The problem is not replication, which is essential to scientific progress. Nor is incremental research inherently without value. The problem arises when such work becomes the default substitute for more ambitious inquiry.
Why Safer Research Wins
Universities play a central role in scientific and technological progress. Yet their evaluation systems can make predictable, publishable research more attractive than original work whose results are uncertain.
Supervisors may be judged partly by whether their students complete their degrees and publish on time. Doctoral committees can evaluate replications more easily because these come with established methods and benchmarks. Faculty appraisal systems that reward publication counts and journal rankings may exert similar pressure further along an academic career.
None of this means that researchers lack ambition or that incremental work lacks merit. It means that institutional incentives influence which questions appear professionally rational to pursue.
The evolution of the University Grants Commission’s doctoral regulations offers one example. Earlier national regulations required Ph.D. candidates to publish at least one refereed paper before submitting their theses. The 2022 regulations removed that nationwide publication requirement, although they retained a pre-submission presentation and universities remain free to impose additional conditions. Many institutions continue to require publication under their own rules.
Publication requirements can encourage productivity and expose research to external scrutiny. But when treated principally as thresholds to be cleared, they may favour projects likely to yield quick, predictable papers over questions requiring prolonged experimentation or carrying a serious risk of failure.
From Institutional Incentives to Research Culture
These incentives are only one part of India’s research environment. Funding, infrastructure, methodological training, international collaboration and academic freedom also matter. Institutional incentives nevertheless deserve attention because they influence what scholars study, how supervisors advise them and what kinds of failure universities are prepared to tolerate.
The 2026 SCImago Institutions Rankings provide one broad – though imperfect – view of India’s position. No India-based institution appears among the top 300 in its overall table; Microsoft India ranks 318 and VIT University, the highest-ranked Indian university, ranks 843. Because the ranking combines research, innovation and societal indicators, it cannot by itself diagnose the causes of India’s performance. It does, however, reinforce the need to examine whether institutions are creating conditions in which ambitious research can flourish.
Rewarding Originality
Reform should not simply replace publication counts with citation counts, which can create distortions of their own. Evaluation should instead combine expert assessment with evidence of methodological rigour, originality, openness, societal or scientific contribution, and the significance of the question pursued.
Doctoral committees should be as willing to support well-justified original proposals as safely replicable ones. Researchers also need stronger methodological training, longer-term support and evaluation systems that recognise the value of informative failure.
Institutions cannot guarantee breakthroughs. They can, however, decide whether intellectual risk is penalised or supported. A research culture that rewards originality is more likely to produce scholars who define new questions rather than merely vary existing answers.