Mapping Human Rights Scholarship in India: A Bibliometric and Thematic Review of Scopus-Indexed Research, 2016-2026

Abstract

Human rights have become a pervasive vocabulary in Indian legal and social science research, yet the structure and direction of this expanding literature have rarely been examined systematically. This review maps 457 Scopus-indexed journal articles on human rights with at least one Indian institutional affiliation, published between 2016 and 2026, using performance analysis and science-mapping techniques. Annual output grew more than five-fold, from 14 articles in 2016 to 75 in 2025 and 82 in 2026, a compound annual growth rate of about 20.5 per cent. The literature is highly dispersed: the 457 articles appeared in 318 journals, 36 of which account for one-third of the output, and 93 per cent of the 1,516 authors contributed only one article. Citation impact is modest (median one citation; 36.3 per cent uncited; dataset h-index 22). Keyword co-occurrence analysis identifies six principal clusters: constitutional equality and discrimination; public health, pandemic and surveillance; artificial intelligence and intellectual property; climate change, displacement and the rights of nature; data protection and international law; and sustainable development and consumer protection. Thematic evolution shows a shift from trade-related intellectual property and health policy in 2016-2020 to COVID-19 and constitutional dignity in 2021-2023, and to artificial intelligence, data protection and climate change in 2024-2026. In contrast, the institutions through which rights are enforced receive very little attention: police, prisons and custody appear in about 2 per cent of articles, caste and Dalit concerns in 2.2 per cent, and the National Human Rights Commission in only three articles (0.7 per cent), none of which takes a commission as its object of study. The review argues that Indian human rights scholarship has undergone a “technological and regulatory turn” that risks neglecting the accountability of the coercive state, and proposes a research agenda centred on enforcement institutions, caste and gender intersections, and data-driven evaluation.