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The purpose of this study is to examine different aspects of information seeking behaviour, and specifically the information seeking behaviour and information needs of Indian astronomy/astrophysics academics, including the relationship between various variables such as academic, rank‐wise statuses, age‐wise of characteristics, and methods for keeping their knowledge up‐to‐date.

A stratified random sample survey was used for gathering data. However, to support and authenticate the data quantitative and qualitative approaches were used. The questionnaire was mailed and was also available online. Some 400 academics from 12 astronomy and astrophysics information centres and libraries were surveyed using the questionnaire and were interviewed. The questionnaire response rate was 72 percent (288/400).

The study findings show: differences in information seeking behaviour and needs for various academic is sub‐fields of Indian astronomy/astrophysics, and highlights the value of information seeking behaviour to scientists working in astronomy/astrophysics. The study concludes that astronomy/astrophysics academics were making use of Astrophysics Data System followed by their use of e‐archives for education and research. Astronomy/astrophysics academics work in a unique setting with specialized needs. The study findings underscored the need to continue accessing specialized needs to find innovative solutions. There are challenges and opportunities for exciting new initiatives.

This is the first in‐depth study in India exploring the information seeking behaviour and information needs of astronomy/astrophysics academics. It also gives the latest account of information seeking behaviour of information users in astronomy/astrophysics discipline. The study is also expected to guide other information service organisations to cope with their users' needs, by adopting survey methods, tools, protocols used in this study.

The present investigation aims to present the status of planetary science research in India using different scientometric indicators, as reflected in the Web of Science Core Collection database.

The researcher adopted systematic approaches to retrieve the data from the Web of Science Core Collection database for 20 years by using AAS Astronomical subject keywords. A total of 1,504 Indian publications and 55,572 World's publications were considered for analysis. The data were analyzed using the biblioshiny application of bibliometrix to investigate the most productive countries/territories, institutions, authors, research fields, journals, keywords, and h, g-index. The VOSviewer program is used to construct and visualize scientometric networks and analyze the co-occurrence of terms. “Webometric Analyst 2.0” is used to retrieve the Altmetric attention scores for the articles.

The results revealed that the publications on planetary science research has increased over time, with an annual growth rate of 9.66%. The study also revealed the prolific authors and institutions, productive journals and most frequently cited journals. The USA was the major collaborating partner of India. The results also provided valuable information on the citations made to these papers on planetary science, including a total number of citations, average citations per item, cited rate and h-index. There were 28,086 citations to 1,504 papers. The top 67 citation papers were the h-core papers on planetary science in India. Altmetric score for planetary science articles ranged from 1 to 2,418. Twitter (69%), news outlets (16%), blogs (6%), and Facebook (6%) were the most popular Altmetric data resources.

This investigation is the first attempt to employ scientometrics and visualization techniques to planetary science research in India.

The main purpose of this paper is to implement the piecewise spectral-variational iteration method (PSVIM) to solve the nonlinear Lane-Emden equations arising in mathematical physics and astrophysics.

This method is based on a combination of Chebyshev interpolation and standard variational iteration method (VIM) and matching it to a sequence of subintervals. Unlike the spectral method and the VIM, the proposed PSVIM does not require the solution of any linear or nonlinear system of equations and analytical integration.

Some well-known classes of Lane-Emden type equations are solved as examples to demonstrate the accuracy and easy implementation of this technique.

In this paper, a new and efficient technique is proposed to solve the nonlinear Lane-Emden equations. The proposed method overcomes the difficulties arising in calculating complicated and time-consuming integrals and terms that are not needed in the standard VIM.

The frequency and consistency of selection by Physics Abstracts of astronomical articles from three major journals, Nature, Astrophysical Journal, and Icarus, have been investigated. This has involved an examination of the probability of selection of an article as a function of its subject matter. As a result, it is possible to specify which fields of astronomy are best covered by Physics Abstracts. The time‐lag between the appearance of these articles and the subsequent appearance of their abstracts has also been examined.

This study aims to highlight the growth and development of Indo-German collaborative research over the past three decades. Moreover, this study encompasses an in-depth examination of funding acknowledgements to gain valuable insights into the financial support that underpins these collaborative endeavours. Together with this paper, the authors provide an openly accessible data set of Indo-German research papers for further and reproducible research activities (the “Indo-German Literature Dataset”).

The data were retrieved from the Web of Science (WoS) database from the year 1990 till the 30th of November 2022. A total of 36,999 records were retrieved against the used query. Acknowledged entities were extracted using a named entity recognition (NER) model specifically trained for this task. Interrelations between the extracted entities and scientific domains, lengths of acknowledgement texts, number of authors and affiliations, number of citations and gender of the first author, as well as collaboration patterns between Indian and German funders were examined.

The study reveals a consistent and increasing growth in the publication trend over the years. The study brings to light that Physics, Chemistry, Materials Science, Astronomy and Astrophysics and Engineering prominently dominate the Indo-German collaborative research. The USA, followed by England and France, are the most active collaborators in Indian and German research. Largely, research was funded by major German and Indian funding agencies, international corporations and German and American universities. Associations between the first author’s gender and acknowledged entity were observed. Additionally, relations between entity, entity type and scientific domain were discovered.

The study paves the way for enhanced collaboration, optimized resource utilization and societal advantages by offering a profound comprehension of the intricacies inherent in research partnerships between India and Germany. Implementation of the insights gleaned from this study holds the promise of cultivating a more resilient and influential collaborative research ecosystem between the two nations.

The study highlights a deeper understanding of the composition of the Indo-German collaborative research landscape of the past 30 years and its significance in advancing scientific knowledge and fostering international partnerships. Furthermore, the authors provide an open version of the original WoS data set. The Indo-German Literature Data set consists of 22,844 papers from OpenAlex and is available for related studies like literature studies and scientometrics.