Indian Welding Journal

About Indian Welding Journal

Overview

Indian Welding Journal is the official technical journal of the Indian Institute of Welding (IIW-India), the national professional body for welding science and technology in India. Published quarterly, the journal has appeared since 1968 and carries technical research papers of a standard intended for working engineers, researchers and fabricators as well as academics. Its print ISSN is 0046-9092, and its standard ISO 4 abbreviation is Indian Weld. J. The journal is based in India and written in English.

That institutional setting matters for understanding what the journal is. It is not a detached commercial title: it is the publishing arm of a membership institute founded on 22 April 1966, with its registered office in Kolkata, branches across India and several thousand individual and industrial members. Alongside its own research papers, the journal has traditionally carried a section drawn from the Welding Journal of the American Welding Society, giving Indian readers a window on practice and research in the United States and giving the title a deliberately practical, profession-facing character.

This profile brings together the verifiable facts about the journal — its publisher and parent body, its history, its subject coverage, its indexing, its place in the Indian qualifications landscape and the practical steps an author should take before submitting. Where a detail such as a current article charge is not publicly disclosed by the institute, this profile says so plainly rather than filling the gap with an estimate, and readers are directed to the institute's own website for the current position.

At a Glance

History and the Indian Institute of Welding

The Indian Institute of Welding was established on 22 April 1966 as a national-level professional body devoted to the promotion and advancement of welding science and technology in India. Its registered office is in Kolkata, and it has grown to a network of branches and student chapters across the country, with a membership counted in the thousands, including a substantial body of industrial and corporate members. The institute's motto, as stated on its own site, is 'Welding for Nation Building' — a phrase that captures the way welding is treated in India as infrastructure-critical engineering rather than a workshop trade alone.

The journal followed two years later, in 1968, and has been published quarterly since. By 2017 it had reached Volume 50, a continuity that makes it one of the longest-running specialist engineering periodicals in India. Over that period the discipline it serves has changed profoundly — from manual metal arc practice on structural steel to automated, robotic, laser and additive processes — and the journal's current subject mix, which includes additive manufacturing, plasma arcs and advanced non-destructive testing, reflects that change.

IIW-India is the Responsible Member Society in India of the International Institute of Welding, the global body for the discipline. Through that standing it has acquired Authorised Nominated Body status to award internationally recognised professional diplomas — International Welding Engineer (IWE), International Welding Technologist (IWT), International Welding Specialist (IWS) and International Welder (IW) — and Authorised Nominated Body for Company Certification status to certify companies against ISO 3834, the quality standard for fusion welding. The institute also runs its own National Welding Training and Certification Scheme and National Welding Inspectors' Certification Scheme through authorised training institutes. The journal therefore sits inside a complete professional ecosystem of training, qualification, certification and publication, and many of its readers encounter it first as members, trainees or certification candidates.

The institute's wider activity reinforces that ecosystem. Its branches organise conferences, seminars, workshops and tutorials, and the National Welding Seminar or National Welding Meet is held each year as a common platform for industry, research institutions and academia. Short courses on welding, allied processes, inspection and non-destructive testing are run at different locations, sometimes jointly with other organisations. For an author, this means the journal's audience is unusually close to practice: a paper may be read by the engineer who has to qualify the procedure, the inspector who has to pass the joint and the researcher developing the next process variant alike.

Scope and Subject Areas

The journal's scope is welding and closely allied joining, cutting and surfacing technology, together with the metallurgy, inspection and service behaviour that determine whether a joint succeeds. The directory record for the journal highlights welding techniques and residual stresses, advanced welding techniques analysis and metal alloys wear and properties as its most characteristic themes, followed by additive manufacturing materials and processes, hydrogen embrittlement and corrosion behaviour in metals, non-destructive testing techniques, vacuum and plasma arcs, and high-temperature alloys and creep.

In practice, authors should read that scope as an invitation to work that is experimentally grounded and relevant to fabrication, repair or service performance. Purely theoretical treatments are most likely to fit when they are tied to a recognisable welding problem and tested against measurement, and purely descriptive case reports are strongest when they extract a transferable lesson rather than merely recording one job. The sections below expand each major strand of the scope in turn.

Welding processes and welding techniques

Arc, resistance, solid-state and advanced joining processes sit at the centre of this journal. Papers in this stream typically describe a process in enough experimental detail for another laboratory or works team to reproduce it: base materials and thicknesses, consumables, shielding arrangements, current, voltage, travel speed and thermal cycles all matter. Strong contributions connect those parameters to measurable outcomes such as bead geometry, penetration, dilution, defect populations and mechanical performance, rather than reporting a single successful weld in isolation. For practitioners, the value of such work is direct, because welding procedure specification and qualification decisions in fabrication shops depend on exactly this kind of parameter-to-property evidence.

Residual stresses and distortion

Few questions matter more in welded fabrication than what stress remains locked into a joint after it cools, and how that stress affects fatigue life, cracking risk and dimensional accuracy. Work in this area combines measurement approaches, such as diffraction-based or hole-drilling methods, with thermal-mechanical modelling, and the journal provides a natural home for studies that test a model against measured data. Articles that follow a component from welding simulation through to service-relevant testing are especially useful, because residual stress is one of the places where a plausible calculation and a real structure can diverge in consequential ways.

Metal alloys, wear and material properties

The journal regularly addresses the metallurgy that underlies joining: heat-affected zone behaviour, phase change in steels and non-ferrous alloys, hardness profiles, toughness and the wear behaviour of hardfaced and cladded surfaces. Papers that pair microstructural evidence with mechanical testing help readers understand why a joint performs as it does, not merely that it passed a test. This stream also covers high-temperature alloys and creep, where long exposure, oxidation and time-dependent deformation shape the useful life of boilers, pressure equipment and power-plant components.

Additive manufacturing and cladding

Wire- and arc-based additive approaches, laser cladding and related deposition routes have moved welding science into manufacturing territory that would have been unfamiliar when the journal began. Contributions here examine layer-by-layer deposition, dilution control, residual stress build-up in deposited parts, post-deposition heat treatment and machining, and the qualification questions that arise when a deposited wall must be treated as a structural component. Because the Indian Institute of Welding also runs national activity on cladding and additive manufacturing themes through its seminars, this topic connects the journal to a wider professional conversation inside India and beyond.

Hydrogen embrittlement and corrosion in metals

Hydrogen-assisted cracking remains one of the most serious failure modes in welded high-strength steels, pipelines and pressure vessels, and it is a recurring concern in this journal's subject mix. Relevant papers study diffusible hydrogen in consumables and weld metal, the effect of preheat and interpass temperature, post-weld heat treatment, and environmental exposure in service. Corrosion work extends the same concern over a longer timescale, covering weld-metal and heat-affected-zone attack, galvanic effects between dissimilar metals and the behaviour of joints in marine, chemical and energy settings.

Non-destructive testing and inspection

A weld that cannot be inspected cannot be trusted, so testing methods form a practical strand of the journal's coverage. Articles deal with radiographic, ultrasonic, magnetic-particle, penetrant and eddy-current approaches, and increasingly with phased-array and time-of-flight techniques, procedure qualification and inspector competence. The link to the institute's own National Welding Inspectors' Certification Scheme gives this stream a particular professional weight in India: inspection is treated not as an afterthought but as part of the same discipline as making the joint itself.

Vacuum, plasma arcs and specialised processes

Beyond everyday fabrication, the journal covers specialised joining environments, including vacuum and plasma arc processes used where oxidation must be tightly controlled or where very high energy density is required. Such papers are relevant to aerospace, nuclear, electronics and research applications, and they tend to emphasise process stability, arc behaviour and the metallurgical consequences of working in controlled atmospheres. Readers comparing a specialised process with a conventional alternative will find the useful contributions are those that state clearly what the extra complexity buys in joint quality or reliability.

Editorial Model and Peer Review

Indian Welding Journal presents itself as a peer-reviewed technical journal, and articles are invited from prospective authors, with submission guidelines published by the institute on its website at iiwindia.com. Because the journal is published by a professional institute rather than a large commercial platform, the practical details that govern a submission — manuscript format, figure preparation, referencing style and the route by which a manuscript is sent — should always be taken from the institute's current guidelines rather than from third-party summaries, which can lag behind changes.

Authors should expect the ordinary disciplines of technical peer review to apply in full. A welding paper lives or dies on reproducibility: consumable designations and classifications, base-material grades and compositions, joint geometry, process parameters, preheat and post-weld treatment, and the standards against which tests were performed all need to be stated. Testing should be referenced to the applicable Indian, ISO, AWS or other recognised standard where one exists, and results should be reported with enough replication and scatter information for a reviewer to judge whether an effect is real. Papers that report optimisation from a single trial run, or that claim improvement without a baseline procedure for comparison, are the kind most likely to struggle in review at any serious welding journal.

Ethical expectations are the standard ones for engineering research and should not be treated as a formality. The work must be the authors' own, must not be under consideration elsewhere, and must credit prior work accurately — particularly where a process development builds directly on an earlier published procedure. Where work was carried out in an industrial setting, authors should confirm they have their employer's permission to publish and should declare relevant commercial interests, for example where a consumable or machine evaluated in the paper is a product of an author's own organisation.

Article Types

The journal is built around technical and research contributions in welding and allied fields. In line with its stated practice, the main forms of contribution are:

• Research and technical papers reporting original experimental, modelling or field work on welding, joining, cutting, cladding or surfacing.
• Review and survey articles that organise a fast-moving topic — a process family, a material class or a failure mode — into a usable account for practitioners and researchers.
• Practical and application articles drawn from fabrication, construction, repair and maintenance experience, where the transferable lesson is made explicit.
• Selected technical articles reproduced from the Welding Journal of the American Welding Society, which have traditionally formed a distinct section of the journal.
• Industry and product-relevant technical information: the journal has also served as a medium for interaction between manufacturers and users in the welding field, as the institute itself describes it.

Authors considering a contribution that does not fall neatly into one of these forms — for example a standards commentary, a failure investigation or a historical piece on Indian welding — should check the current guidelines or approach the editorial office first, rather than assuming the format will be accepted.

Indexing, Metrics and Visibility

According to the institute-facing descriptions of the journal, its articles are indexed by EBSCO (USA), i-Scholar, J-Gate and the Indian Citation Index, and the journal has been included in the list of approved journals of the University Grants Commission (UGC) of India — a listing that matters to Indian academic authors because UGC-recognised publication has historically carried weight in faculty appointment and promotion assessment in Indian universities. Authors who need the journal's UGC status for a specific assessment exercise should confirm its current standing in the present UGC-CARE framework before relying on it, since list membership is revised over time.

The directory record for the journal gives an H-index of 14, meaning that 14 of its articles have each been cited at least 14 times in the underlying citation data. That is a modest figure by the standards of large international materials journals, and it should be read in context: this is a national professional journal whose influence runs substantially through practice, standards awareness and professional qualification in India, channels that citation counts do not capture well. Authors choosing the journal should therefore weigh audience fit and professional reach alongside bibliometric indicators, and should not expect the citation profile of a broad Scopus-indexed materials title.

Just as importantly, authors should be clear about what the journal is not. It should not be confused with the Welding Journal published by the American Welding Society, despite the historical content link between the two, nor with similarly named commercial welding magazines. The ISSN 0046-9092 is the reliable identifier: if a website offering publication under this title cannot be tied back to the Indian Institute of Welding, it is not this journal.

Publishing Model, Fees and Access

The journal is the publication of a professional membership institute, and its articles are read by institute members and subscribers. The sources consulted for this profile do not publish an article processing charge for the journal, and no submission-fee figure is publicly disclosed in its official descriptions; any charge, page cost or membership-related condition that applies at the time of submission should be confirmed directly with the institute through its official website. Authors should be wary of any third-party service quoting a fee to place an article in this journal, and of so-called agents offering guaranteed acceptance — a legitimate institute journal does not sell acceptance.

Access for readers follows the institute model rather than a fully open-access model: the directory record marks the journal as not open access. Readers who are IIW-India members, or whose institution holds the journal through one of its indexing and aggregation services, will generally have the most straightforward route to full texts. Individual articles may also be traceable through the Indian Citation Index and the aggregators named above.

How to Submit

Prospective authors are invited to submit articles on welding and cutting, and the institute directs authors to its published guidelines. A careful submission process looks like this:

• Confirm fit first: read recent issues and check that your topic falls inside welding, joining, allied processes, inspection or the metallurgy of welded joints.
• Obtain the current article submission guidelines from the Indian Institute of Welding website (iiwindia.com) and follow them exactly for format, length and submission route.
• State complete process and material information: base-material grade and composition, consumable classification, joint design, parameters, thermal cycle and applicable test standards.
• Present results with microstructural and mechanical evidence where claimed, including test replication and a comparison against a baseline procedure or prior published work.
• Declare funding, employer permission to publish and any commercial interest in equipment or consumables evaluated in the paper.
• Submit only to the institute through its stated channel, keep the acknowledgement of receipt, and do not submit the same manuscript elsewhere while it is under consideration.

Because a quarterly journal has limited space per issue, authors should also be prepared for a longer interval between acceptance and appearance in print than an online-first commercial title would involve, and should check the current issue pattern on the institute's site when planning around assessment or project-reporting deadlines.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Read It

The natural authors for Indian Welding Journal are researchers in welding, materials and manufacturing at Indian universities and national laboratories; welding engineers in fabrication, shipbuilding, railways, power, petrochemical and construction; specialists in inspection and quality assurance; and practitioners who have solved a joining, repair or failure problem in a way others can learn from. International authors with work relevant to the journal's scope are also part of its potential authorship, particularly where a study addresses materials, processes or service conditions common in Indian industry.

The readership mirrors that authorship and extends to the institute's membership of individual professionals and industrial corporate members, students in the institute's training and certification schemes, and libraries and aggregators carrying the journal through its indexing services. A paper published here reaches readers who can act on it in procedure qualification, inspection planning, training and standards work — a form of impact that is easy to undervalue if publication decisions are made on citation metrics alone.

Authors deciding between this journal and an international materials or manufacturing title should ask where their problem belongs. Work whose main contribution is fundamental metallurgical science may travel further in a dedicated materials journal; work whose contribution is a better-qualified procedure, a clearer understanding of a fabrication or service problem, or evidence that speaks directly to Indian industrial practice is exactly what a national professional journal of this kind exists to publish.

Research Integrity and Ethics

Research integrity for a journal of this type rests on honest reporting of experiments and tests. Welding results are sensitive to details that are easy to omit — a changed interpass temperature, a different electrode batch, a retest that replaced a failed specimen. Omitting such details can make a procedure look more robust than it is, with consequences that extend beyond scholarship into the safety of real structures. Authors should report retests and exclusions openly, give the governing standard for each test, and avoid presenting a supplier's product data as independent measurement.

Plagiarism and duplicate publication are treated seriously across Indian academic publishing, and UGC frameworks have made institutions more attentive to both. Authors should write their own account even of standard procedures, cite the sources of reproduced data or images, and ensure that a conference paper and a journal paper based on the same work differ substantively and cross-refer honestly. Where photographs or data come from an employer's project, permission and attribution should be settled before submission, not after acceptance.

How to Verify the Journal and Cite It Correctly

To verify that you are dealing with the genuine journal, work from identifiers rather than names. The title is Indian Welding Journal, the print ISSN is 0046-9092, the ISO abbreviation is Indian Weld. J. and the publisher is the Indian Institute of Welding, whose official site is iiwindia.com. Cross-check those details against the ISSN record and the institute's own description of the journal as its official quarterly publication.

When citing the journal, use the standard abbreviation Indian Weld. J., with the year, volume, issue and page range as given in the issue itself. The journal reached Volume 50 in 2017, which gives authors and librarians a useful continuity check when dating a reference: a citation claiming a very high volume number for an early year, or the reverse, should be checked against the actual issue. Keeping the institute as publisher in the citation record also helps distinguish the journal from the American Welding Society's Welding Journal in databases where the two titles are sometimes loosely conflated.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Indian Welding Journal?
The print ISSN is 0046-9092. No separate online ISSN is publicly disclosed in the official descriptions consulted for this profile.

Who publishes Indian Welding Journal?
The Indian Institute of Welding (IIW-India), the national professional body for welding in India, founded in 1966 and headquartered in Kolkata. The journal is its official technical publication.

How often is the journal published?
Quarterly — four issues a year. It has been published on that pattern since 1968 and reached Volume 50 in 2017.

What subjects does the journal cover?
Welding techniques and processes, residual stresses, alloy metallurgy and wear, additive manufacturing and cladding, hydrogen embrittlement and corrosion, non-destructive testing, vacuum and plasma arc processes, and high-temperature alloys and creep.

Is Indian Welding Journal indexed?
Its official descriptions list indexing by EBSCO, i-Scholar, J-Gate and the Indian Citation Index, and inclusion in the University Grants Commission approved-journal list. Authors should confirm current UGC-CARE standing for assessment purposes.

Does the journal charge authors a fee?
No article charge is publicly disclosed in the sources consulted. Confirm any current condition directly with the institute through its official website, and avoid third-party agents quoting fees for placement.

Is the journal open access?
No. The directory record marks it as not open access; access is principally through institute membership, subscription and aggregation services.

What is the journal's H-index?
The directory record gives an H-index of 14.

How do I submit a manuscript?
Articles on welding and cutting are invited from prospective authors. Follow the article submission guidelines published on the Indian Institute of Welding website and submit through the channel stated there.

Conclusion

Indian Welding Journal occupies a distinctive place in Indian engineering publishing: a quarterly, peer-reviewed technical journal, published since 1968 by the country's professional institute for welding, embedded in a system of training, internationally recognised qualification and company certification that few journals anywhere can match. Its strengths are continuity, professional reach and a scope that follows real fabrication and service problems from process parameters through metallurgy to inspection.

For authors, it is best suited to work that speaks to welding practice and applied research in an Indian and international professional audience, reported with the complete procedural and testing detail that peer review in this field demands. Verify current submission requirements on the institute's own website, cite the journal by its ISSN and standard abbreviation, and treat its H-index as only one part of a wider professional value that citation counts measure poorly.