Indian scales and inventories.

This conceptual, perspective and review paper on Indian scales and inventories begins with clarification on the historical and contemporary meanings of psychometry before linking itself to the burgeoning field of clinimetrics in their applications to the practice of clinical psychology and psychiatry. Clinimetrics is explained as a changing paradigm in the design, administration, and interpretation of quantitative tests, techniques or procedures applied to measurement of clinical variables, traits and processes. As an illustrative sample, this article assembles a bibliographic survey of about 105 out of 2582 research papers (4.07%) scanned through 51 back dated volumes covering 185 issues related to clinimetry as reviewed across a span of over fifty years (1958-2009) in the Indian Journal of Psychiatry. A content analysis of the contributions across distinct categories of mental measurements is explained before linkages are proposed for future directions along these lines.