Scientometric Analysis of Mechanical Engineering Research

A well known field of engineering right from the olden days is mechanical engineering. It is also referred to as 'mother' branch of engineering. Mechanical engineering is the most "broad-based" of the engineering disciplines. The graduates in mechanical engineering get into exciting careers in aerospace, automobile design, consumer electronics, biotechnology and bioengineering, software engineering, and business. Another appealing feature of mechanical engineering is that the application base of this field of study is extremely broad and diverse. Almost all inventions during the ancient period and a vast majority in the modern era are direct contributions of one or the other application of mechanics. There has been rarely a study on the literature output of mechanical engineering in terms of the publications in the area and it¿s interdisciplinary associations. Rao (1999) in his paper on "A quantitative study of Indian engineering literature¿ found out that the publications on mechanical engineering globally are decreasing but the contributions were increasing from India.