ASIAN JOURNAL OF HOME SCIENCE

About ASIAN JOURNAL OF HOME SCIENCE

Asian Journal of Home Science: India's Established Home Science Research Journal in Profile

The Asian Journal of Home Science (AJHS) is a peer-reviewed Indian journal devoted to the full breadth of home science — food and nutrition, textiles and apparel, family resource management, human development and child study, and home science extension. It is an official publication of the Hind Agri-Horticultural Society (HAS) and is produced through the society's publishing arm, the Hind Institute of Science and Technology, whose journal portal at researchjournal.co.in carries its archive. The journal appears twice a year, in June and December issues, and its volume numbering — volume 2 in 2007, volume 15 in 2020 — traces continuous publication from 2006. For the large community of Indian home science researchers, postgraduate students and agricultural-university faculty who publish in this field, AJHS is a familiar, long-running venue with a documented NAAS rating history; for readers outside India it is a useful window onto applied household, nutrition and community research as practised across South Asia. This profile sets out what the journal publishes, how its editorial process works, how its metrics should be read, and what authors should verify before submitting.

Home science itself needs a word of introduction for international readers. In the Indian university system, home science — increasingly also styled community science — is an established applied discipline taught in agricultural universities and women's universities across the country, combining nutrition science, textile science, child development, household resource management and extension education into a single professional curriculum aimed at family and community wellbeing, with a particular emphasis on rural households and women. A general journal for the discipline therefore publishes genuinely varied work, and AJHS's contents reflect that: a single issue can move from infant feeding practices and nutritional status surveys to garment design preferences, kitchen ergonomics and the psychology of farm women. That variety is the discipline working as designed, not a lack of focus.

At a Glance

Identity checks for this title are straightforward but worth doing, because several similarly named journals exist. The ISSN pair 0973-4732 (print) and 0976-8351 (online) and the HAS imprint identify this journal; it is distinct from the Asian Journal of Home Science namesakes that occasionally appear in low-quality listings with different ISSNs, and distinct from HAS's sibling titles such as the Asian Journal of Environmental Science and the Asian Journal of Bio Science, which share the publisher and portal but not the subject or the ISSNs.

History and the Hind Agri-Horticultural Society

The journal belongs to a family of periodicals built up by the Hind Agri-Horticultural Society, an Indian learned-society publisher whose list spans agriculture, horticulture, crop improvement, environmental science, food science and home science. That stable matters: AJHS was created as the home science member of a portfolio whose other titles follow the same editorial template — society ownership, a named editorial board, refereed research papers and shorter research notes, and print-plus-online distribution aimed at Indian university libraries. The first volume appeared in 2006, and the archive shows the journal settling quickly into its lasting pattern: two issues a year, dated June and December, carrying research from home science departments across India — agricultural universities in Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Odisha, Punjab and beyond all appear in the author affiliations of early volumes. Volume 4 (2009) already shows the mature mix of nutrition surveys, textile and apparel studies and family studies; volumes 8 and 9 (2013–2014) carry the same range at greater length; and by volume 15 (2020) the journal's articles were being cited in university records with their NAAS rating noted as a matter of course, a sign of the journal's settled place in the Indian agricultural-academic ecosystem. The society's imprint line in the journal's PDFs — Hind Institute of Science and Technology — and its centralised peer-review and plagiarism policy, published as a single HAS policy document, reflect a portfolio run on shared infrastructure rather than as a one-off title.

Scope in Depth

Food science and nutrition

Nutrition is the journal's largest strand. Typical papers report dietary and nutritional status surveys of defined groups — tribal preschool children, adolescent girls, pregnant and nursing mothers, farm women — using anthropometry, dietary recall and biochemical measures where available; studies of breastfeeding and infant feeding practices in urban and rural communities; product-development work in which underused ingredients (paneer whey, fenugreek leaf, dehydrated vegetable powders, tulsi flavouring) are turned into acceptable, nutrient-dense foods and evaluated by sensory panels and nutrient analysis; and intervention studies testing nutrition education or supplementation. The Journals World record's topic list, led by nutrition, health and food behaviour, accurately reflects this emphasis.

Textiles, apparel and design

The second strand covers textiles and clothing: fibre and fabric studies, dyeing and modification of textile fibres, design preference studies for defined wearer groups such as adolescent girls, apparel construction and the economics and ergonomics of garment work. The record's listing of fashion and cultural textiles, crafts and textile design among the journal's leading topics matches the archive, where design-preference and product-development papers from clothing and textiles departments form a steady stream.

Human development and family studies

Child development and family research form the third strand: studies of learning and cognition in adolescents (including experimental work on light and sound stimulation), emotional intelligence and metacognition among college students, altruism and empathy in rural and urban adolescents, and the psychological situation of particular groups such as farm women. These papers are typically questionnaire- and scale-based studies from human development and family studies departments, often with samples drawn from schools and colleges in a defined district or state.

Family resource management, extension and community studies

The fourth strand addresses the household as an economic and physical system: resource management, kitchen work and physiological cost of household tasks, employment attitudes of female agricultural labourers, consumer and livelihood studies, and extension-oriented work intended to carry research findings to rural communities. Papers on agricultural development and social and economic development in India, both visible in the record's topic list, sit in this strand. Taken together, the four strands cover the standard five-fold division of Indian home science curricula, which is precisely the journal's stated ambition: original research in all branches of home science and cognate branches of sufficient relevance.

Article Types, Peer Review and Publication Practice

The journal publishes three categories of contribution, as set out in the publisher's description: review, strategy and case-study articles, which are commissioned by invitation from persons of eminence; full research papers; and shorter research notes. The society's published peer-review and plagiarism policy describes the machinery behind those categories in unusual detail for a journal of this size, and authors should read it before submitting. Manuscripts must be the author's original work; plagiarism, including self-plagiarism and unattributed reuse of others' words or results, is checked against online databases and is not tolerated; fabrication or manipulation of data leads to blacklisting; simultaneous submission to more than one journal is prohibited; and submissions are normally refereed by two experts suggested by the editorial board, with editors free to seek additional reviews and final decisions resting with the editors on the referees' reports. Submissions are treated as confidential documents. In practical terms the journal is a print-led biannual: issues close well ahead of their June and December cover dates, acceptance timelines follow the issue cycle rather than a rolling online-first queue, and authors should build the society's review stages — plagiarism screening, two-referee review, revision — into their expectations. Fees, where charged by the publisher for its journals, are handled through the publisher's portal; because amounts change and third-party listings for this journal disagree, treat any fee figure not confirmed on the publisher's own site or by the editorial office as unverified, and confirm the current position before you submit.

Indexing, NAAS Rating and Metrics: How to Read Them

For Indian agricultural and home science academics, the operative quality signal for a journal like AJHS has historically been its NAAS rating — the score maintained by the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences for journals in its domain, used in assessment and promotion frameworks across the agricultural university system. AJHS carried a NAAS rating of 4.44 through the late 2010s: university publication records cite that figure for the journal's 2020 volume, and a published analysis of NAAS-rated family-resource-management journals shows the same 4.44 figure repeated across the 2017–2020 rating years before the journal's entry was marked as not scored in the 2021 list because the information required for rating had not been submitted. Authors should therefore describe the 4.44 figure accurately as a historical rating, and check the current NAAS list for the journal's present status rather than assuming the old score still applies — ratings lapse when journals do not file, and a lapsed rating says more about paperwork than about editorial quality. The citation picture on this Journals World record is modest — an h-index of 10 with a four-figure citation total on OpenAlex-derived data — which is normal for a regional, print-led applied journal whose readership works mainly in Indian universities and cites heavily from Indian sources that international databases cover thinly. Judge the journal instead on continuity (two decades of biannual publication), society ownership, a published review policy, and the verifiable presence of its articles in university libraries and scholarly records across India.

Who Should Publish Here, and Pre-Submission Checks

AJHS fits researchers whose work is empirical, population- or product-focused and rooted in the Indian home science curriculum: nutrition and health surveys, food product development, textile and apparel studies, child and adolescent development studies, household resource and ergonomics research, and extension studies with community samples. It is a natural home for postgraduate and early-career research from home science departments, and for studies whose value lies in careful local data — a district-level nutritional profile, a well-run sensory evaluation — rather than in theoretical novelty. Before submitting, run four checks. First, confirm the journal's identity by ISSN (0973-4732 / 0976-8351) and by the HAS imprint, so your manuscript goes to the society's real portal and not to a look-alike site. Second, read the HAS peer-review and plagiarism policy and screen your own manuscript accordingly, since the society checks submissions against plagiarism databases. Third, format as a research paper or research note (reviews are by invitation) and align the study explicitly with one of the journal's strands in your covering note. Fourth, if NAAS or similar rating status matters for your assessment, verify the journal's current rating on the current official list at the time you submit, and keep a dated copy for your records.

Inside a Typical Issue: How to Read This Journal Well

Because AJHS serves a whole discipline rather than a subfield, its issues reward selective, question-driven reading. A researcher interested only in nutrition can extract real value from the survey papers, which typically report sample frame, instruments and headline anthropometric or dietary findings in a compact format that makes cross-study comparison within India practical: district-level studies from different states, taken together across volumes, build a patchwork picture of child nutrition, women's health and household food behaviour that no single study provides. Product-development papers follow a recognisable recipe of their own — formulation, standardisation, sensory evaluation on hedonic scales, nutrient computation, shelf-life or cost comment — and are most useful read in pairs, comparing how different teams handled similar ingredients. The textile and design papers likewise report preference distributions and construction details for defined wearer groups, which design researchers can mine directly. The human development papers are scale-and-questionnaire studies whose instruments are often named in the text, making them a practical source for researchers choosing measures for Indian school and college populations. Two reading cautions apply across all strands. First, sample sizes are frequently modest and geographically specific, so findings should be generalised with care and cited with their setting attached. Second, methods sections in older volumes can be brief by current standards; where a paper's design matters to your argument, check whether the same team published a fuller account elsewhere. Used with those cautions, the back run is a genuinely useful evidence base for Indian applied home science — and, for historians of the discipline, a record of what Indian home science departments were actually researching, state by state and year by year, across two decades.

For systematic reviewers, the journal is worth hand-searching rather than relying on database alerts alone: its indexing in the major international databases is limited, its PDFs live on the publisher's portal rather than in the big commercial collections, and relevant studies can be missed by searches built only on Scopus or Web of Science. Searching the portal by strand keywords — nutrition, apparel, ergonomics, adolescents, farm women — and scanning June and December issue contents year by year is slower, but it is how the community that cites this journal actually finds its material, and it regularly surfaces Indian district-level datasets that exist in no other published form.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of the Asian Journal of Home Science? Print ISSN 0973-4732 and online ISSN 0976-8351, matching the pair carried on this Journals World record and in the journal's bibliographic listings.

Who publishes the journal? The Hind Agri-Horticultural Society (HAS), through its publishing arm, the Hind Institute of Science and Technology; the journal is described by the publisher as an official publication of the society.

How often does it appear? Twice a year, in June and December issues; the volume sequence runs from volume 1 in 2006 through volume 15 in 2020 and onward.

What subjects does it cover? All branches of home science: food and nutrition, textiles and apparel design, human development and child study, family resource management, and home science extension, together with cognate community and agricultural-development topics.

What kinds of articles does it accept? Research papers and research notes are open to submission; review, strategy and case-study articles are published by invitation from eminent contributors, per the publisher's description.

Is it peer-reviewed? Yes. The society's published policy provides for refereeing by two experts, plagiarism screening of submissions, and editorial decisions based on referees' reports.

What is its NAAS rating? The journal was NAAS-rated at 4.44 across the late 2010s, as cited in university records for its 2020 volume; its entry was marked as not scored in the 2021 list, so check the current NAAS list for its present status.

What is its h-index? This record carries an h-index of 10 on OpenAlex-derived data — a modest figure typical of a regional applied journal, and best read alongside its two decades of continuous publication.

Librarians building Indian social-science and agricultural collections should note the journal's place in the HAS portfolio: subscribing libraries typically take the society's titles as a family, and the shared portal means back issues of AJHS can be ordered and read alongside the food science, environmental science and crop titles whose readerships overlap with home science departments. For inter-library purposes the ISSN pair in this profile, together with the June–December issue pattern, is sufficient to identify holdings unambiguously.

Bottom Line

The Asian Journal of Home Science is a workhorse journal of Indian home science: society-owned, biannual, refereed under a published policy, and continuously in print since 2006, publishing the nutrition, textile, family and community research that its discipline actually produces. Its historical NAAS rating of 4.44 and its long back run matter more than its small international citation footprint. For home science researchers with sound empirical work — and readers who need Indian household, nutrition and community data — it remains a credible, verifiable venue, provided authors confirm its current rating status and submit through the publisher's genuine portal.