Indian Journal of Community Health

About Indian Journal of Community Health

Indian Journal of Community Health — Journal Profile

The Indian Journal of Community Health (IJCH) is the official national publication of the Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine (IAPSM), India's professional body for specialists in preventive and social medicine — the discipline known internationally as community medicine and public health. Published quarterly in print and online, the journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access outlet for research and commentary on the public health problems of India and other developing countries: epidemiology, health systems and policy, nutrition, maternal and child health, communicable and non-communicable disease, environmental and occupational health, and health equity. Its print ISSN is 0971-7587 and its online ISSN is 2248-9509, the pair recorded on this JournalsWorld record and stated on the journal's own site. Articles are free to read online with no subscription or pay-per-view charge, are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, and may be self-archived by their authors in any OAI-compliant repository. For public health researchers, community medicine faculty, postgraduate trainees and programme managers working on Indian and South Asian health questions, IJCH is one of the longest-established society journals in the field — the association behind it was founded in 1974, and the journal's coverage in international databases runs from 2001.

The association and the journal

The Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine, founded in 1974, is a non-profit professional organisation of specialists in epidemiology, health management, health promotion and family medicine. Its stated purposes include promoting public health by bringing members' expertise to the development of public health policy, advocating for education, research and programmes in community medicine, and providing a forum for the exchange of views and information. The association describes its membership as more than five thousand public health professionals and academics, drawn heavily from the community medicine departments of India's medical colleges — the departments that staff district health systems, run rural and urban health training centres, and train every Indian medical undergraduate in the social and preventive dimensions of medicine.

IJCH is the association's journal and its public voice. The journal's own description calls it an official national publication of IAPSM, peer-reviewed and quarterly, appearing in both online and print versions. International database coverage recorded for the title begins in 2001, with continuous coverage from 2012 in the major citation databases. Within Indian community medicine, the journal occupies a particular niche: it is owned by the discipline's own professional association rather than by a commercial publisher, it charges readers nothing, and its editorial identity is explicitly tied to the priorities of Indian public health practice — priority problems, developing-country perspectives, and research findings that can be used for public health action.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal's aim-and-scope statement is deliberately broad. It invites quality research on epidemiology; public health administration, policy, planning and implementation; medical education technology; nutrition; maternal and child health; communicable and non-communicable diseases; environmental and occupational health; and health equity and equality, with special emphasis on original findings relevant to developing countries, including India. The fuller statement of scope adds public health and primary health care, health administration and health systems, health economics, health promotion, public health nutrition, social and preventive medicine, and the social sciences as they bear on health. The journal states plainly what this breadth is for: it provides an avenue for medical scientists to publish original research so that the research can be used for public health action, and it aims ultimately to contribute to the knowledge and practice of public health.

That action orientation shapes what appears. Alongside original research articles, an issue may carry editorial commentaries, continuing medical education (CME) pieces, viewpoints, review articles, case studies, research briefs, policy-and-practice reports, reports from the field, "public health classics" revisiting foundational work, book reviews and letters to the editor. For a district-level programme evaluation, a state health-system study or a community-based intervention trial that might struggle for space in a general medical journal, IJCH offers a readership of exactly the people who run comparable programmes elsewhere in India. The journal also publishes work from other developing and developed countries where it bears on the same priority questions.

Editorial process and journal statistics

IJCH describes its editorial workflow in unusual detail on its own site, and authors can plan around published figures. The journal uses double-blind peer review: author identities are concealed from reviewers and reviewer identities from authors. Submissions are handled through the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform. On submission, a manuscript is assigned to the editor best placed to handle its subject. An editor who judges a manuscript below the quality threshold, or outside the journal's scope, rejects it without further processing. Manuscripts that pass that screen go to a minimum of two and a maximum of five external reviewers, whose recommendations range across accept, revision required, resubmit for review, resubmit elsewhere and decline. The handling editor then decides; if two reviewers recommend decline, the manuscript is rejected. Revised manuscripts may be checked by the editor alone or sent for a fresh round of review, depending on the decision category.

The journal publishes its own performance statistics (2022 figures, as posted on its site): 28 days to first editorial decision, 89 days to acceptance, 19 days to rejection, an acceptance rate of 28 per cent against a rejection rate of 72 per cent, a desk-rejection rate of 25 per cent and a post-review rejection rate of 47 per cent. Accepted articles appear online about 21 days after acceptance, with print publication following in about two months. The journal also operates an ahead-of-print model under which articles published online are citable as published. These are the journal's own reported figures for 2022, and authors should treat them as a guide to the editorial tempo rather than a guarantee for any individual manuscript.

Ethics, licensing and archiving

The journal states that it follows the guidance of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), the Directory of Open Access Journals, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) and the World Association of Medical Editors (WAME). Its published policies cover redundant and duplicate publication (strongly discouraged, with retraction as the stated remedy where overlap is found after publication), plagiarism (with sanctions that include rejection and a bar on future submissions), conflicts of interest (to be declared at submission and published with the article), permissions for reproduced material, patient consent, and ethics-committee approval for human research. Retractions follow the COPE retraction guidelines.

On access, the position is unambiguous: the journal provides immediate open access to its articles on the principle that free availability supports the global exchange of knowledge, and articles are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, which permits sharing and adaptation for any purpose, including commercially, with attribution. Authors may self-archive the final accepted version in any OAI-compliant institutional or subject repository. Digital preservation is arranged through CLOCKSS, which allows participating libraries to hold archival copies of the journal's content. Whether an article processing charge applies is a detail the journal's site should be consulted for directly, since fee policies change; this profile makes no claim about charges that it could not verify from the journal's own pages at checking time.

Indexing and metrics

The journal's own site lists its abstracting and indexing arrangements. Abstracting partners named by the journal include EBSCO's electronic databases, Google Scholar, Hinari and PubMed (for chosen citations only). The journal states that it is indexed with, or included in, CINAHL, the Emerging Sources Citation Index, Indian Science Abstracts, IndMed, SCImago Journal Ranking, Scopus and Web of Science. A listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals could not be verified at the time this profile was checked — a DOAJ search-API query for both of the journal's ISSNs returned no record — so authors for whom DOAJ listing is a formal requirement should verify the current position themselves.

Citation indicators place IJCH in the smaller, practice-oriented tier of public health journals, which is the correct frame for judging it. OpenAlex (source S2737651596, resolved through the ISSN endpoint and checked for this profile) records 1,228 works for the journal, cited 2,717 times, with an OpenAlex h-index of 16, an i10-index of 51 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.44. SCImago-based reporting gives an h-index of 17 — the figure carried on this JournalsWorld record — and places the journal in the fourth quartile for Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health. The small difference between the two h-index values reflects the different citation universes the databases count. For the journal's core purpose — reaching Indian public health practitioners, faculty and policymakers — database quartiles are a partial measure at best; the readership that acts on its programme evaluations and field reports is precisely the audience least visible to citation counting.

How to submit

Manuscripts are submitted through the journal's online system on its official site, where the current author instructions are maintained. Authors should prepare work within the stated scope, follow the journal's formatting and referencing requirements, declare conflicts of interest at submission, document ethics-committee approval and patient consent where the research requires them, and expect double-blind review by at least two external reviewers. The journal's published workflow statistics suggest allowing roughly three months from submission to a likely acceptance decision for papers that survive review, plus about three weeks to online publication after acceptance. Work with a clear line to public health action — a programme that was evaluated honestly, a district dataset analysed well, a policy implementation studied in the field — matches the journal's stated mission most directly.

Similar journals

Authors comparing Indian and regional public health outlets may also consider the Indian Journal of Public Health (the journal of the Indian Public Health Association), the Indian Journal of Medical Research, the National Medical Journal of India, the Indian Journal of Preventive and Social Medicine, and international titles in community and global health. IJCH's distinguishing marks are its ownership by IAPSM, its free-to-read open-access model with liberal self-archiving, its quarterly society-journal rhythm, and its explicit welcome for practice-facing work — field reports, programme evaluations and policy pieces alongside conventional research articles.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Indian Journal of Community Health open access? Yes. Full-text articles are free to read online, are distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence, and authors may self-archive the accepted version in OAI-compliant repositories.

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 0971-7587 and online ISSN 2248-9509.

Who publishes the journal? The Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine (IAPSM), founded in 1974, whose membership the journal describes as more than five thousand public health professionals and academics.

How often does it appear? Quarterly, in print and online.

How is peer review conducted? Double-blind, through the OJS platform, with two to five external reviewers per manuscript; the journal's 2022 statistics report a 28 per cent acceptance rate and 28 days to first editorial decision.

Where is it indexed? The journal lists CINAHL, the Emerging Sources Citation Index, Indian Science Abstracts, IndMed, Scopus and Web of Science among its indexing services, with PubMed carrying chosen citations; a DOAJ listing could not be verified when this profile was checked.

The discipline behind the journal: community medicine in India

IJCH cannot be understood apart from the discipline it serves. Community medicine — preventive and social medicine in its older Indian name — is a compulsory part of undergraduate medical education in India and a postgraduate speciality in its own right. Its departments are responsible for teaching epidemiology, biostatistics, demography, health management, nutrition, environmental and occupational health, and the organisation of the national health programmes, and they run the rural and urban health training centres where medical students first meet the health system outside a hospital ward. IAPSM, founded in 1974, is the professional home of that discipline's specialists, and its published declarations have addressed the definition, role and scope of community medicine and the functions of its specialists — health consultant, health manager and leader of the health-care delivery system among them.

A journal owned by that association inherits both an audience and an agenda. The audience is unusually practitioner-heavy for a research journal: district programme officers, medical college faculty, postgraduate residents preparing theses, and state and national programme managers all read the same title. The agenda follows from India's disease burden — a country carrying a heavy load of communicable disease and maternal and child mortality while non-communicable diseases, injuries and the health effects of air pollution and urbanisation rise around it. Papers that help a district team run an immunisation session better, evaluate a nutrition programme honestly, or measure a risk factor properly in an Indian population are not filler in this journal; they are its centre of gravity. That is also why the journal gives house room to genres that grander titles disdain — reports from the field, programme descriptions, book reviews and letters — because in a practice discipline, the field report is often where usable knowledge first appears.

Reading a typical issue

A quarterly issue of IJCH normally opens with editorial commentary on a live policy or programme question, followed by a body of original articles. Those articles are characteristically Indian in their data even when their questions are universal: knowledge-attitude-practice studies in defined communities; prevalence surveys of hypertension, diabetes, anaemia, tobacco use or mental-health conditions in district populations; evaluations of national programme components such as immunisation, tuberculosis control, maternal health schemes and school health services; hospital- and community-based studies of maternal and child health outcomes; occupational and environmental health studies of defined worker groups; and methodological or educational studies from community medicine departments about their own teaching. Review articles and CMEs synthesise fast-moving areas for practitioners, and case studies and viewpoints carry arguments and experiences that do not fit the original-article mould.

Two features of this mix deserve emphasis for outside readers. First, much of the journal's content is primary documentation of the Indian health system at work — programme data, district surveys and implementation experience that exist nowhere else in the international literature, and that later systematic reviewers of Indian public health interventions repeatedly draw on. Second, the journal's developing-country framing is substantive rather than rhetorical: studies are expected to state their setting, their population and their resource context clearly enough that a reader in another low- or middle-income country can judge whether the findings travel. Authors who write to that expectation — explicit setting, honest limitations, conclusions tied to programme decisions — are writing in the journal's native register.

For authors: fit, preparation and realistic expectations

Fit is the first hurdle, and the journal's workflow makes it a fast one: a quarter of submissions were desk-rejected in the journal's reported 2022 statistics, most plausibly for scope and quality reasons the editors can see without review. A manuscript whose question, population or intervention has no bearing on community health, prevention or health systems should go elsewhere. Preparation is the second hurdle. The journal expects the apparatus of ethical Indian health research to be visible in the paper — ethics-committee approval, consent procedures, conflict-of-interest and funding declarations — and its published plagiarism and duplicate-publication policies are enforced with stated sanctions, so overlapping submissions and recycled text are genuine risks to an author's standing with the journal, not formalities.

Expectations about reward should be calibrated honestly. IJCH is not a high-impact-factor title, and its fourth-quartile standing in its Scopus category reflects a citation economy that rewards other kinds of journal. What it offers instead is reach into the Indian public health system itself: publication in the association journal of the discipline, open-access availability to any district office or medical college with an internet connection, a citable record in Scopus and the Emerging Sources Citation Index, and a realistic editorial timetable — the journal's own figures suggest a first decision in about a month and, for accepted work, online appearance about three weeks after acceptance. For a postgraduate thesis study, a programme evaluation or a district survey whose natural readers are Indian practitioners and policymakers, that combination is frequently worth more than a longer wait for a marginally grander masthead.