Indian researchers don't seem to believe very much in international collaborations when it comes to publishing research papers. Between 2001 and 2005, only 18.8% of Indian research publications were internationally collaborative. This increased to 19.5% between 2006 and 2010 — a meager increase of 0.6%.

As against this, internationally collaborated research publications jumped by 8% for the UK.

According to the findings of the study on India's research output and collaboration conducted by Thomson Reuters and recently submitted to the department of science and technology, Indian scientists it seems love collaborating with the US with the highest number — 13,173 research publications — co-authored by researchers based in the US and India in 2010. This, however, represented 6.6% of India's research output.

Germany was the second most frequent collaborating country with India and the UK third with 4,996 and 4,555 publications co-authored respectively with researchers in India.

Collaboration with China in publishing scientific papers increased from 999 papers in 2001-2005 to 2,009 papers, which is just a 0.1% increase.

Collaboration as a percentage share of India's overall research output has increased with South Korea (0.6%), and Australia (0.2%) and decreased with Japan (-0.4%).

In absolute numbers, Indian researchers co-authored 3,368 papers with Japan, 3,110 with France, 2,974 with South Korea, 2,186 with Canada, 2,009 with China, 1,815 with Australia and 1,751 with Italy.

International collaboration in pharmacology and toxicology was the lowest amongst all research fields while levels of collaboration were second lowest in the field of agricultural sciences. Collaboration in microbiology was 16.3% in 2006 a fall of -7.8% on 2001 - the largest fall in collaboration across all fields.

Collaboration in neuroscience and behavior is relatively low compared to other fields — 16.3% in 2006-10 with only a small increase (+1.7%) on 2001-05 levels of collaboration. US and UK are India's most frequent collaborating partners.

Levels of collaboration in environmental science stood at 21.3% of overall research which went ahead and saw a 4% increase.