Not Indexed Does Not Mean Not Good
India’s journal quality landscape evolved over decades. Its most significant national benchmark was scrapped almost overnight. Here’s what that means — and what comes next.
📘 What You’ll Learn
- How India’s journal quality landscape evolved from informal reputation to the UGC CARE list
- What the sudden dissolution of the CARE list in 2025 actually means in practice
- Why the international indexing default has real structural limits for Indian scholarship
- The critical distinction between “not indexed” and “poor quality” that everyone keeps missing
- What institutions, researchers, and journals must each do now
For much of India’s post-independence academic history, journal quality was assessed informally — through the reputation of the publishing institution, the standing of an editorial board, and the judgment of senior academics.
This worked reasonably well in a smaller, slower-moving system. It did not scale.
As the sector expanded and the UGC’s Academic Performance Indicators system from 2010 tied faculty career advancement directly to publication counts, the pressure to publish intensified across every kind of institution. Fee-for-publication outlets emerged — journals that charged fees and skipped meaningful peer review, offering researchers a quick route to a publication credit.
The UGC CARE list, launched in 2018, was India’s response. It created a curated national register of journals vetted against defined criteria: peer review processes, editorial transparency, publication consistency, and ethical publishing practices. For the first time, Indian researchers had a shared national benchmark.
It was not perfect. Some pay-and-publish journals found ways onto the list. Others that deserved inclusion were left out, including respected journals in Indian languages. Bureaucratic delays and opaque decision-making drew legitimate criticism. In 2025, the UGC discontinued the list on the recommendation of an expert committee, framing the decision as a move toward institutional autonomy in line with the National Education Policy 2020.
In place of the CARE list, the UGC issued 36 suggestive parameters across eight dimensions to help higher education institutions evaluate journals themselves. The intention is decentralisation and flexibility. The risk is something else entirely.
The CARE list, for all its flaws, gave researchers and institutions a shared reference point. Its abolition without a mandatory replacement has created a vacuum — and vacuums in academic systems are rarely filled equitably.
India’s higher education system comprises over 1,000 universities and more than 40,000 colleges, across enormous variation in resources, governance capacity, and research culture. Asking each to independently develop credible journal evaluation frameworks is, in practice, asking many of them to do something they are not equipped to do quickly or consistently. The UGC’s parameters are non-binding. Institutions are encouraged, not required, to act on them.
Where standards are unclear, dubious publishers thrive. Voices across the academic community have questioned why a system made mandatory in 2018 was abruptly scrapped without a clear alternative — and who compensates researchers whose promotions were shaped by the list’s requirements.
The bad actors in this story are real, and they deserve to be called out. But the answer to a system that let some dubious journals through at its edges cannot be to dismantle the system entirely. The majority of CARE-listed journals were there for legitimate reasons. They passed review, met criteria, and demonstrated genuine editorial commitment. They should not bear the cost of what others did.
When institutional capacity is limited and standards are unclear, decision-makers reach for the simplest available proxy. In the Indian academic context, that proxy has long been indexing in Scopus or Web of Science. With no nationally-vetted alternative remaining, the gravitational pull toward these databases will only intensify.
As one commentator noted on the dissolution, discontinuing the CARE list would give more “power” to international databases — databases maintained by commercial publishers, a conflict of interest that allows publishers to influence what counts in science.
Both Scopus and Web of Science carry structural bias toward research from North America and Western Europe, toward English-language publications, and toward STEM disciplines. A 2024 study in Scientometrics found that journals from Europe, Oceania, and North America were significantly more likely to be indexed than those from other regions, with South Asian journals facing meaningful representation gaps. Outsourcing India’s quality judgement to these databases does not eliminate subjectivity — it relocates it to systems designed for different publishing ecosystems, with different histories and different blind spots.
There is also a practical dimension that rarely gets discussed. Librarians at Indian institutions are understandably reluctant to subscribe to journals not indexed in major databases. But many of the researchers and faculty at those same institutions actively publish in non-indexed journals. The result is a quiet institutional disconnect: scholarship produced within an institution that the institution’s own library cannot easily support or surface. This is not a failure of the researchers. It is a structural gap that better recognition of credible Indian journals would help close.
A journal that earned its place on the CARE list did so through a process. It passed review. It met criteria. It demonstrated editorial rigour and a commitment to peer review within the Indian context. That record did not evaporate when the list was abolished.
What many of these journals may lack — and this distinction matters enormously — is not research quality, but the administrative infrastructure, international networking, and funding required to pursue and maintain international indexing. The indexing process is not purely a quality test. It is also a bureaucratic and financial undertaking that favours journals with dedicated staff, institutional backing, and the resources to sustain multi-year compliance processes.
It is worth asking a more fundamental question: does a journal’s absence from a major index tell us anything meaningful about the research it publishes?
Consider how academic careers actually develop. Very few researchers begin by publishing in the highest-ranked journal in their field. Early-career academics — particularly those at regional institutions without established networks — start where they can. They publish in credible, accessible outlets to build a record, receive peer feedback, and develop as scholars. Does that make their early work useless? Does it mean the journals that gave them that first foothold carry no value?
A blanket equation of “not indexed” with “not credible” fails researchers at exactly the stage when they are most vulnerable. Platforms like IndianJournals.com — which catalogue peer-reviewed Indian journals across 17 subject areas with transparent editorial information — offer researchers a way to identify and publish in credible Indian journals even in the absence of a government-maintained national list.
The answer is not to restore the CARE list. Its problems were real, and the push toward higher publishing standards is correct. But the dissolution has created real uncertainty, and that uncertainty needs active management.
For Institutions
Take the UGC’s suggestive parameters seriously rather than treating them as a formality. Internal journal evaluation committees are a sound idea — but only if adequately resourced and applied consistently across hiring, promotion, and research funding. Evaluate publications in formerly CARE-listed journals on their documented peer review quality, not indexing status alone.
For Senior Faculty
Mentoring early-career researchers on journal selection is now essential — but it must be structured and institutionalised, not left to the goodwill of individual supervisors. The researchers most at risk are those who already have the least access to informal guidance networks.
For Researchers
Directories like IndianJournals.com offer a practical starting point — a searchable catalogue of peer-reviewed Indian journals that allows researchers to verify a journal’s credentials before submitting. Citing credible Indian scholarship where appropriate also matters structurally: one reason Indian journals struggle with citation metrics required for international indexing is that researchers are often channelled toward publishing abroad, creating a self-reinforcing cycle that keeps domestic journals harder to index.
For Journals
The UGC’s suggestive parameters provide a useful self-assessment framework. Journals that demonstrate transparent editorial boards, documented peer review, consistent publication history, and DOI registration are better positioned for both institutional recognition and future indexing candidacy. Maintaining visibility through platforms like IndianJournals.com is one practical way to stay discoverable when there is no central list to rely on.
India has the intellectual depth and institutional scale to develop a credible approach to research quality on its own terms. The question is not whether Indian scholarship is worth recognising. It demonstrably is. The question is whether India will build the infrastructure to do so — or continue to wait for external validation before acting.
The standard should rise. But it should rise with Indian scholarship, not over it.
Key Takeaways
- The UGC CARE list was scrapped in February 2025 after legitimate concerns about over-centralisation and the inclusion of dubious journals — but its abolition without a mandatory alternative has left researchers and institutions in genuine uncertainty.
- The replacement — 36 non-binding suggestive parameters for higher education institutions — places the burden of journal evaluation on institutions with widely varying capacity to deliver it.
- The most likely outcome, without deliberate intervention, is over-reliance on Scopus and Web of Science — databases that carry well-documented structural biases against journals from the Global South.
- Not being indexed in a major international database does not make a journal — or the research it publishes — poor quality. It often reflects resource and infrastructure constraints, not editorial failure.
- Early-career researchers are disproportionately affected: most likely to have published in credible but non-indexed journals, and most vulnerable to the ambiguity the current landscape creates.
- Institutions, researchers, and journals all have a role to play in navigating this transition. Platforms like IndianJournals.com offer a practical starting point for discovering and verifying credible Indian scholarship in the absence of a national list.
- Patwardhan, B. et al. “A critical analysis of the ‘UGC-approved list of journals’.” Current Science, 114, 1299–1303 (2018).
- “India ends approved journal list in ‘blow’ to research quality.” Times Higher Education, 21 February 2025.
- “UGC halts CARE reference list of journals for ‘greater academic freedom’.” The Print, 12 February 2025.
- “UGC discontinues CARE List journals, switches to decentralised journal evaluation.” ANI, 11 February 2025.
- Tennant, J.P. “Web of Science and Scopus are not global databases of knowledge.” European Science Editing, 46, e51987 (2020).
- Asubiaro, T., Onaolapo, S., & Mills, D. “Regional disparities in Web of Science and Scopus journal coverage.” Scientometrics, 129, 1469 (2024).
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