ABSTRACT
This paper examines the scenario of research orientation in Ayurveda educational institutions of India.We demonstrate through the data obtained by searching the SCOPUS that the actual research outputby these institutions is not very significant in terms of number of publications. While a lack of researchexpertise and infrastructure is one contributing factor to this status, a lack of questioning attitude is morecrucial one. Mushrooming of new colleges, laxity in regulations, corruption, lack of atmosphere forethical and quality research make the problem more complex. We show, with the help of SCOPUS Data,that the recent trend of establishing stand-alone institutions of Ayurveda may not help in invigoratingresearch activities since the research contributions from such institutions have always been very poor.Instead, we suggest that existing stand-alone institutions of Ayurveda be merged with other establishedCentral/State universities or other Medical colleges. The data demonstrates that the research output hasbeen always significant when an institution has many experts working in different streams of sciencewithin, than when the institutions have only Ayurveda experts. We also take up the question of designingthe clinical trials that are suitable for Ayurveda and propose an algorithm that may be considered forresearch in educational institutions, at least at doctoral level. We further enlist a set of recommendationsthat could potentially change the scenario. Evidence-informed policy making, inducting clinicians intothe education system, making the curricula more attractive by including recent advances, introducingefficient faculty training programs, and rigorous implementation of the existing regulations - are some ofthe key recommendations we have made.© 2018 Transdisciplinary University, Bangalore and World Ayurveda Foundation. Publishing Services byElsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).