NEW DELHI: About 88 per cent of University Grants Commission (UGC)-approved non-indexed journals were found to be of low quality and lacked essential information or provided incorrect or false information such as incorrect International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) and false claims about impact factor.
This was revealed through a critical analysis of the ‘UGC approved list of journals’ by researchers of Pune University, Banaras Hindu University and Rajasthan University of Health Sciences, that was published in the March 25 edition of Current Science.
The researchers developed a protocol with objective criteria of identifying journals that do not follow good publication practices.They studied 1,336 journals randomly selected from 5,699 in the university source component of the ‘UGC-approved list’ and analysed 1,009 journals after excluding 327 indexed in Scopus/Web of Science.
“Only 112, out of 1,009 journals (11.1 per cent) from the non-indexed journals in the university source category examined by us qualified in the analysis,” the study said.