Defence Life Science Journal

About Defence Life Science Journal

Defence Life Science Journal — India's DRDO Journal for the Life Sciences Behind the Armed Forces

The Defence Life Science Journal (DLSJ) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published in India by the Defence Scientific Information and Documentation Centre (DESIDOC), the publishing centre of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) under India's Ministry of Defence. Its online ISSN is 2456-0537 and its print ISSN is 2456-379X. The journal was created for a readership that most life-science journals never address directly: the scientists, physicians, physiologists, food technologists, pharmacologists and psychologists whose work keeps soldiers alive, fed, healthy and effective in some of the harshest environments on earth — high-altitude posts, deserts, jungles, submarines, aircraft cockpits and nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) threat environments.

That mission shapes everything about the journal. A conventional physiology journal asks what the human body does; this journal asks what the human body does at 5,000 metres in sub-zero cold, under hypoxic stress, on ration packs, in protective equipment, or after exposure to toxic agents — and what science can do about it. Readers who arrive here from a general journal directory should therefore read the profile below carefully: the Defence Life Science Journal is a legitimate, government-published, open-access journal with a narrow but deep remit, a modest citation footprint typical of applied defence research, and a submission process that follows the formal conventions of Indian government scientific publishing.

Journal identity at a glance

Full title: Defence Life Science Journal. Standard abbreviation: Def. Life Sci. J. (the ISO 4 and NLM abbreviation). Online ISSN: 2456-0537. Print ISSN: 2456-379X. Publisher: Defence Scientific Information and Documentation Centre (DESIDOC), Delhi, India, on behalf of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Ministry of Defence, Government of India. Country: India. Publishing platform: the DRDO publications portal, which runs on Open Journal Systems (OJS) and also hosts the older and larger Defence Science Journal. Access model: open access — articles are freely readable on the publisher's site; OpenAlex likewise records the journal as an open-access source. First published: 2016, when DRDO separated its life-sciences output from the multidisciplinary Defence Science Journal into a dedicated title. Language: English.

Two identity points deserve emphasis because directory records — including the earlier version of this very profile — have garbled them. First, the publisher is an institution, not a number: an earlier structured record for this journal carried a bare numeric string in the publisher field, which is a data artifact, not a publisher. The correct publisher is DESIDOC, verified against the journal's own site, its OpenAlex host-organisation record, and SCImago-derived listings, all of which agree. Second, the journal has two ISSNs, not one. The online ISSN 2456-0537 is the one most often quoted, but the print ISSN 2456-379X is recorded by the NLM catalogue and by OpenAlex, and authors citing the print edition should use it.

Why DRDO created a separate life-science journal

DRDO's flagship periodical, the Defence Science Journal, has published since the late 1940s across the whole span of defence science and technology. By the 2010s, however, DRDO's life-sciences cluster had grown into a substantial research community in its own right. Its laboratories work on physiology and allied sciences, food technology and military nutrition, psychological research and personnel selection, nuclear medicine and radiation protection, and high-altitude agro-animal research supporting troops deployed in mountain regions. A generalist journal could no longer give that community a focused home, and civilian life-science journals rarely prioritised questions — such as acclimatisation schedules, high-altitude pulmonary risk, ration design for extreme climates, or protective pharmacology — whose primary audience is military.

The Defence Life Science Journal was the organisational answer: a dedicated, peer-reviewed outlet, launched in 2016, in which defence life-science research could accumulate as a coherent literature rather than scattering across a generalist title. OpenAlex's source record, which indexes the journal's output year by year, shows publication beginning in 2016 and continuing without interruption to the present — 28 indexed works in the launch year, rising to a steadier band of roughly 34 to 51 works a year in the 2021–2025 period. That is the output profile of a small, stable, institutionally anchored journal, not of a commercial title chasing volume.

Scope: what the journal publishes

The journal's own author guidelines describe its remit directly: it caters to scientists, researchers and academicians in the life sciences and biomedical sciences, and publishes research featuring recent progress in the field of defence and military life-support systems. The guidelines enumerate the territory: physiology; food technology; NBC warfare protection; biotechnology; pharmacology and toxicology; psychology; biomedicine; bio-engineering; bio-electronics; and non-invasive life imaging, among related areas.

Translated into the research questions that actually appear in its pages, that scope covers, among other themes: human performance and acclimatisation at high altitude, including hypoxia research (one of the journal's most visible topic clusters in OpenAlex); medicinal plant research and phytochemistry directed at products useful to troops, such as herbal interventions studied for altitude and stress conditions; food science for military rations, including preservation, packaging and nutritional adequacy; toxicology and countermeasures relevant to chemical and biological threats; human factors and psychology for personnel selection and performance; and biomedical technologies with a defence application. OpenAlex's topic assignment for the journal — medicinal plant research, high altitude and hypoxia, plant growth and agriculture techniques, phytochemicals and antioxidant activity, and food and agricultural sciences — matches the official scope closely, which is a useful cross-check that the indexed content is what the journal says it is.

Equally important is what sits outside the scope. Purely clinical research with no defence or life-support connection, general civilian public-health work with no military relevance, and weapons-oriented engineering all belong elsewhere — the first two in civilian biomedical journals, the last in DRDO's Defence Science Journal or engineering titles. The single most common reason a manuscript fails at a journal like this is not quality but fit: editors of institution journals desk-reject out-of-remit work quickly, and the defence connection must be genuine and explicit, not a sentence added to the introduction.

Article types and the submission process

The journal publishes full research papers and review-type contributions reporting original work within its remit. Submissions are made online through the DRDO publications portal after registration, and the journal's guidelines specify the mechanics with the formality typical of Indian government publishing: manuscripts are submitted in MS Word format, typed to a stated page format, and must be accompanied by the journal's required declarations — most distinctively a Certificate of Originality, signed by the authors, certifying that the work is original, has not been submitted elsewhere, is approved by all authors and by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and carries no undisclosed conflicts of interest. The guidelines also ask for a brief biodata of the authors with their individual contributions.

Prospective authors should read those requirements literally. Government-institution journals enforce their checklists at the editorial-office stage, and a missing certificate or an incorrectly formatted manuscript is returned before peer review begins. Authors from outside DRDO — the journal does accept work from the wider academic community whose research fits its remit — should additionally expect questions about the defence relevance of the work and should state it plainly in the cover material rather than leaving editors to infer it.

On peer review: the journal presents itself as peer-reviewed, and its editorial process sits inside DESIDOC, which has run DRDO's journals for decades. Specific operational details that some directories assert — review timelines, acceptance rates, decision deadlines — are not published by the journal in a form this profile could verify, so they are not stated here. Authors who need a timeline commitment for a thesis or project deadline should write to the editorial office through the official portal and ask, rather than relying on third-party estimates.

Open access and charges

The Defence Life Science Journal is published open access: its articles can be read in full on the DRDO publications site without subscription or payment, and OpenAlex records the source as open access. No article processing charge is published on the journal's site in the material reviewed for this profile; DRDO's journals are government-funded institutional publications, and DESIDOC titles have historically not operated on an author-pays model. If a fee is ever requested, authors should verify it exclusively through the official portal — a standing precaution with any journal, and one that costs nothing to follow.

Indexing and bibliometric standing — read the sources, not the slogans

This is the section where directory profiles most often mislead, because each database draws the journal's boundary differently and produces a different number. The honest picture, source by source, is as follows.

OpenAlex (source record fetched directly on 18 October 2026) indexes 499 works with 2,020 citations, giving the journal an OpenAlex h-index of 20 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.31. Its yearly counts show continuous publication from 2016 through 2025, with 42 works already recorded for 2026 at the time of reading.

SCImago / Scopus-derived listings tell a smaller story, because Scopus coverage of the journal is narrower than OpenAlex's. SCImago-derived aggregators report an SJR of about 0.14–0.16 in recent years (0.158 in one recent listing; 0.142 for 2023 in another) and a Scopus-based h-index in the single digits (6 for 2023 in the SciJournal compilation), with Scopus subject classification under Agricultural and Biological Sciences; Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology; and Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics, and reported Scopus coverage years of 2019–2022. The earlier version of this profile carried an h-index of 11 — a figure that matches neither the OpenAlex record (20) nor the SCImago-derived series (6) — which is precisely why this profile now attributes every figure to its source and date instead of printing one unattributed number.

DOAJ: a search of the Directory of Open Access Journals by the journal's ISSN returned no record on 18 October 2026, and OpenAlex likewise flags the journal as not in DOAJ. Authors whose funders require DOAJ listing should treat the journal as not DOAJ-listed unless that changes, and should confirm current status directly in DOAJ before submitting.

How should a researcher interpret all of this? The Defence Life Science Journal is a small, specialised, nationally anchored journal. Its citation indicators are modest in absolute terms — as expected for applied defence life-science work, much of which serves an operational readership rather than a large citing academy — but they are real, internally consistent within each database, and attached to a verifiable government publisher with a decades-long publishing track record. It should not be compared with large international biomedical titles on raw metrics; it should be compared with other national defence and institutional life-science journals, against which its profile is respectable.

Who should consider publishing here

The strongest fit is a researcher — in DRDO, in Indian universities and institutes, or in allied international institutions — whose work answers a life-science question with a direct defence or life-support application: altitude and environmental physiology, military nutrition and food technology, protective pharmacology and toxicology, NBC medical countermeasures, defence psychology, biomedical devices for field use, or medicinal-plant research aimed at such applications. For those authors the journal offers a readership that actually works on their problem, an open-access platform with no evident author charges, and the permanence of a government publisher.

Weaker fits should think twice. Authors who need a high-impact-factor line for promotion, a DOAJ-listed venue for funder compliance, or the fastest possible decision should check those specific requirements against what is documented above before submitting. Authors outside the defence ecosystem should be able to state, in one honest paragraph, why this journal's readers are the right audience for their paper; if that paragraph cannot be written, the paper belongs in a civilian journal.

The publisher: DESIDOC and DRDO's journal programme

Understanding who stands behind a journal is the fastest credibility check a researcher can run, and in this case the answer is unusually concrete. DESIDOC, based in Delhi, is DRDO's centre for scientific information and documentation: it runs DRDO's library and information services and has served for decades as the organisation's publishing house, producing the Defence Science Journal — one of India's longest-running defence periodicals — alongside monographs, reports and, since 2016, this journal. Publishing is therefore not a sideline or a commercial venture for the centre; it is its institutional function, funded as part of India's defence research infrastructure. That has practical consequences authors can rely on: the journal is not dependent on article charges for survival, its archive sits on a government platform rather than a start-up's website, and its editorial office can be reached through the same portal that carries DRDO's other journals.

The Defence Life Science Journal also benefits from a built-in scholarly community. DRDO's life-sciences laboratories — working on physiology and allied sciences in Delhi, food research in Mysuru, psychological research, nuclear medicine, and high-altitude research supporting deployments in the Himalayas — form a natural author and referee base whose daily work matches the journal's scope. Papers in its pages on acclimatisation, altitude illness countermeasures, ration science and herbal adaptogens are not curiosities; they are the published edge of an operational research programme, which is why the journal's medicinal-plant and hypoxia clusters look so distinctive next to a civilian physiology title. For outside researchers, publishing alongside that community is the journal's real offer: not raw citation counts, but a readership of specialists for whom the work has direct use.

Reading the journal as a literature source

Researchers who never intend to submit can still get value from the journal as a reading source, and its open-access model makes that straightforward. Systematic reviewers working on altitude medicine, military nutrition, protective pharmacology or herbal interventions for stress and hypoxia should include it in their search strategies: because much DRDO work appears here rather than in commercial journals, omitting it biases a review of the Indian defence life-science literature. The archive on the publisher's portal is browsable by issue and searchable, and the OpenAlex record provides a machine-readable route to its contents for bibliometric work. Citation practice is standard: cite the article with the journal's abbreviated title, Def. Life Sci. J., and the online ISSN where a bibliography requires it.

Verification checklist for authors

Before submitting to this — or any — journal, run the checks that distinguish the genuine title from imitators. Use only the official portal reached from DRDO's own web presence (publications.drdo.gov.in) for submission and correspondence. Confirm the ISSNs (online 2456-0537; print 2456-379X) match the journal you are dealing with. Confirm the publisher named is DESIDOC, Delhi. Treat any look-alike site, unsolicited email solicitation, or fee demand arriving outside the official portal as a red flag and verify it with the editorial office through the portal itself. These steps take minutes and eliminate nearly all impersonation risk.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ISSN of the Defence Life Science Journal? The online ISSN is 2456-0537 and the print ISSN is 2456-379X.

Who publishes the Defence Life Science Journal? The Defence Scientific Information and Documentation Centre (DESIDOC), Delhi — the publishing centre of India's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Ministry of Defence.

Is the journal open access? Yes. Articles are freely readable on the DRDO publications portal, and OpenAlex records the journal as an open-access source.

Is the journal listed in DOAJ? A DOAJ search by ISSN returned no record on 18 October 2026; authors should re-check DOAJ directly if listing matters to them.

What are the journal's citation metrics? They depend on the database. OpenAlex (fetched 18 October 2026) records 499 works, 2,020 citations and an h-index of 20. SCImago-derived listings, based on narrower Scopus coverage, report an SJR around 0.14–0.16 and a single-digit h-index. Neither figure is a Journal Impact Factor, and the journal should not be described as having one without a Journal Citation Reports record.

What subjects does it cover? Defence-oriented life sciences: physiology (including high-altitude and environmental physiology), food technology and military nutrition, NBC protection, biotechnology, pharmacology and toxicology, psychology, biomedicine, bio-engineering, bio-electronics and non-invasive life imaging.

How do I submit? Register and submit online through the DRDO publications portal, following the journal's author guidelines exactly, including the signed Certificate of Originality the guidelines require.

Sources used for this profile

Journal and publisher identity, scope and submission requirements: the journal's official pages and author guidelines on the DRDO publications portal (publications.drdo.gov.in). ISSN pair and abbreviation: NLM catalogue data as compiled by Paperpile, cross-checked against OpenAlex. Bibliometric figures: OpenAlex source record S4210169304, fetched directly on 18 October 2026. SJR and Scopus-coverage figures: SCImago-derived aggregator listings (ResearchBite; SciJournal), attributed as such in the text. DOAJ status: DOAJ search API by ISSN, queried 18 October 2026. Figures from different databases are not interchangeable; each is reported with its source.