A Critical Analysis of the ‘UGC-Approved List of Journals’

Scholarly journals play an important role in maintaining the quality and integrity of research by what they publish. Unethical practices in publishing are leading to an increased number of predatory, dubious and low-quality journals worldwide. It has been reported that the percentage of research articles published in predatory journals is high in India. The University Grants Commission (UGC), New Delhi has published an 'approved list of journals', which has been criticized due to inclusion of many substandard journals. We have developed a protocol with objective criteria for identifying journals that do not follow good publication practices. We studied 1336 journals randomly selected from 5699 in the university source component of the 'UGC-approved list'. We analysed 1009 journals after excluding 327 indexed in Scopus/Web of Science. About 34.5% of the 1009 journals were disqualified under the basic criteria because of incorrect or non-availability of essential information such as address, website details and names of editors; another 52.3% of them provided false information such as incorrect ISSN, false claims about impact factor, claimed indexing in dubious indexing databases or had poor credentials of editors. Our results suggest that over 88% of the non-indexed journals in the university source component of the UGC-approved list, included on the basis of suggestions from different universities, could be of low quality. In view of these results, the current UGC-approved list of journals needs serious re-consideration. New regulations to curtail unethical practices in scientific publishing along with organization of awareness programmes about publication ethics at Indian universities and research institutes are urgently needed.