India Citation Awards instituted by Thomson Reuters were given to ten senior scientists of the country. The awardees include celebrated theoretical physicists Thanu Padmanabhan and Varun Sahni and environmental scientist Vinod Kumar Garg.

The other awardees are Anunay Samanta (physical chemistry and photochemistry), Murali Sastry (nanobiotechnology), Rabin Banerjee and Sandip Trivedi (both theoretical physics and cosmology); Umesh Waghmare (applied physics and materials science, computational methods).

Sarit Kumar Das (mechanical engineering, heat transfer) Velayutham Murugesan (physical, organic and environmental chemistry) were also among the awardees.

The awards were given on the parameters of their highly cited research papers written over a decade between 2002-2011 reported Business Standard.

“A threshold of at least five highly cited papers was set as the minimum requirement for selection in order to identify only individuals who demonstrated repeated high impact contributions in their respective fields,” informed David Pendlebury, Consultant (Bibliometric Analysis) with Thomson Reuters.

Samanta is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Hyderabad; Sastry is the Director of India Innovation Centre of DSM India Private Limited.

Banerjee is a Senior Professor, Department of Theoretical Sciences, S N Bose National Centre for Basic Sciences. Trivedi teaches Theoretical Physics at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research.

While Das is the Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering, IIT-Madras, Padmanabhan is a Research Scientist at Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA).

Waghmare is the Professor, Theoretical Science Unit, Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR). Sahni is a Professor at IUCAA.

Murugesan is the Professor of Chemistry (Eminence) at Anna University and Garg is an Associate Professor, Department of Environmental Science and Engineering, Guru Jambheshwar University of Science and Technology, Hisar.