Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research

About Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research

Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research — Journal Profile

The Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research (JICPR) is the flagship journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research (ICPR), India's national body for the promotion of philosophy, and is published internationally by Springer. It is a peer-reviewed philosophy journal with a dual allegiance that defines its character: it fosters discussion and debate on the philosophical traditions of India and on contemporary philosophy in India, while maintaining a continuous dialogue with mainstream and alternative Anglo-American and Continental philosophies. Springer describes its particular area of interest as the special place it reserves for philosophical work emanating from the Indian subcontinent. For philosophers working on Indian texts and traditions, on comparative philosophy, or on the classical problems of philosophy addressed from an Indian vantage point, JICPR is one of the discipline's established international venues.

The journal's Springer home page sets out its commitments plainly: originality of thought and research across varied philosophical traditions; interdisciplinary engagement with fundamental philosophical questions; comprehensiveness of argument; and ingenuity of scholarship. Those are demanding criteria, and they explain the journal's format — substantial original papers, review papers and book reviews that range from close readings of pre-modern Sanskrit texts to debates in contemporary metaphysics, ethics, philosophy of mind and aesthetics.

Quick Facts

History: From the ICPR's Founding Decade to Springer

JICPR began in 1983, in the founding period of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research itself. The Council's founder chairman, Professor D. P. Chattopadhyaya — a philosopher known internationally for his work in philosophy of science and for large collaborative projects on Indian intellectual history — conceived the journal as a periodical of international standard that would be philosophically relevant and intellectually viable for its time, and he served as its first editor. The early editorial board assembled for that project included many of the leading figures of post-independence Indian philosophy, among them J. N. Mohanty, Margaret Chatterjee and Sibajiban Bhattacharyya, together with international members — a board composition that announced the journal's comparative ambition from the start.

Chattopadhyaya edited the journal from its first volume in autumn 1983 until August 1990. He was succeeded by Daya Krishna, one of the most original Indian philosophers of the twentieth century, who edited JICPR until his death in October 2007 and reshaped it in the process: Daya Krishna added sections such as "Discussion and Debate" and "Agenda for Research", intending to breathe life into the journal and to build a philosophical community around it. That legacy is still visible in the journal's willingness to publish exchanges, responses and programmatic pieces alongside conventional articles. The Tel Aviv University Contemporary Indian Philosophy Archive, which preserves the volumes of the Chattopadhyaya and Daya Krishna years, notes that many young Indian scholars published their first article in JICPR during those decades — the journal functioned as a training ground and meeting place for a generation of Indian philosophy, not merely as an outlet.

In its current Springer era, the journal carries an electronic ISSN (2363-9962) alongside the long-standing print ISSN (0970-7794), is distributed globally through SpringerLink, and is edited by Sachchidanand Mishra as editor-in-chief, according to Springer's journal page. The Council retains copyright in the journal. Recent content shows the range the journal maintains in practice: within a few months of issues in 2025–2026, Springer lists papers on Gandhi's reading of the Bhagavad Gita, Vaiśeṣika realism and its modern historiography, Jain philosophy and the ethics of peace, Buddhist meditation and temperament, socially engaged Buddhism and global civil society, the philosophy of dream consciousness, and an intercultural aesthetics moving between the Western concept of aura and the Indian theory of rasa. That spread — classical Indian systems, Gandhian thought, Buddhist studies, comparative aesthetics and contemporary analytic questions treated side by side — is the journal's scope statement enacted.

Aims and Scope in Detail

Springer's aims-and-scope text for JICPR can be unpacked into four commitments. First, the journal encourages discussions and debates on the philosophical traditions of India — plural traditions, spanning the orthodox and heterodox schools, bhakti and Sufi thought, and modern Indian philosophy — and on contemporary philosophy in India, meaning both new work by Indian philosophers and philosophical reflection on Indian conditions. Second, it sustains a dialogue with Anglo-American and Continental philosophy: submissions that put Indian and Western sources into genuine argumentative contact are the journal's signature genre, provided the contact is philosophical rather than merely juxtaposed. Third, within that frame, research and interpretations concerning pre-modern and modern Indian textual sources are highly welcome, especially when viewed through an innovative lens — new translations, re-readings and reconstructions of arguments from Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit, Persian and vernacular sources sit at the journal's historical core. Fourth, the journal welcomes interdisciplinary engagements with fundamental philosophical questions, and work ranging from the close examination of single texts and philosophers to detailed annotated translations and re-readings of standing philosophical problems.

The emphases Springer lists — originality of thought and research, comprehensiveness of argument, ingenuity of scholarship — operate as real refereeing criteria. A purely summary exposition of a text or thinker, however accurate, is a weak fit; a paper that reconstructs an argument, tests it against objections, and shows why it matters to a live debate, Indian or global, is the journal's home ground. Authors should also note the journal's debate culture, inherited from the Daya Krishna years: position papers that anticipate and answer criticism fare better than manifestos, because the journal's readership expects philosophy to proceed by argument and counter-argument.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

Springer's page names Sachchidanand Mishra as editor-in-chief. Beneath the editor-in-chief, the journal works through Springer's standard editorial and peer-review machinery: submitted manuscripts are assessed for fit and quality, sent to expert referees, and decided on the basis of their reports. Springer publishes a journal-level service indicator that authors can use in planning: the median time from submission to first decision is 94 days, according to the metrics panel on the journal's Springer page at the time of research. Ninety-four days is neither fast nor unusually slow for a philosophy journal with international refereeing; authors should build it into submission plans, particularly where a doctorate, appointment or promotion timetable depends on an outcome. The same Springer panel recorded 28,300 downloads in 2024 — a meaningful readership figure for a specialist philosophy title, and evidence that the journal's articles are actively read through library subscriptions worldwide.

Indexing and Discoverability

Springer lists JICPR as abstracted and indexed in a long set of services. The headline entries are Scopus and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) of the Web of Science, which together place the journal in the two citation ecosystems that most evaluation systems use. Around those sit the discovery and bibliography services that matter for philosophy and for Asian studies: PhilPapers and the Philosopher's Index — the discipline's own bibliographies — together with Dimensions, EBSCO, ProQuest, Google Scholar, Baidu, CNKI, CNPIEC, Naver, Wanfang and eLibrary.ru, and preservation and discovery infrastructure including CLOCKSS, Portico, OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service and TD Net Discovery Service. SCImago also carries the journal, reflecting its Scopus coverage.

A direct check of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) search interface for both ISSNs (2363-9962 and 0970-7794) returned no listing at the time of research. That is the expected result for a hybrid subscription journal and carries no implication about quality. Open access copies of individual articles exist where authors have chosen Springer's open access option or deposited accepted manuscripts in repositories, and readers will also encounter the journal's deep back archive — including the Chattopadhyaya and Daya Krishna era volumes preserved by the Contemporary Indian Philosophy Archive at Tel Aviv University — through library and archive channels.

Metrics — Reading Them Properly

Springer publishes the journal's official headline metrics on its own page: a Journal Impact Factor of 0.1 for 2024 and a five-year Journal Impact Factor of 0.1 for 2024. Those are the figures an author should quote when an institution asks for the journal's impact factor, attributed to Springer and the 2024 Journal Citation Reports cycle. Philosophy is a slow-citation field: arguments are absorbed over years, books matter as much as articles, and a specialist journal serving Indian and comparative philosophy will never post the impact factors of a biomedical title. A 0.1 figure should be read against the field's baseline, not against science-wide league tables.

The Journals World record previously displayed an h-index of 7 and a Scopus-derived quartile of Q3 in Philosophy, with coverage from 2015 — values consistent with the aggregator picture of the journal (one aggregator summary gives a CiteScore of 0.2, an SJR of 0.131 and a Q3 Philosophy placing). Independent open data tell a compatible story: a direct OpenAlex lookup of the ISSN record (source S4210200161, resolved via the ISSN endpoint for 2363-9962 and 0970-7794) recorded 390 works and 461 citations with an h-index of 9 at the time of research, with leading OpenAlex topics in Indian and Buddhist studies, epistemology, ethics and metaphysics, and philosophy and theoretical science. The differences between an h-index of 7 (Scopus-based aggregators) and 9 (OpenAlex) are database-coverage differences, not contradictions; this profile attributes each number to its source so that readers can verify them. Acceptance rate and review-speed figures beyond Springer's published median are not published by the publisher, so none are invented here.

Publication Model and Fees

JICPR is published by Springer under a hybrid model. The default route is the traditional subscription route: accepted articles are published without an article processing charge to the author, and readers access them through subscriptions and libraries, with the copyright line reading © Indian Council of Philosophical Research. Authors who need or prefer immediate open access can choose Springer's open access option after acceptance; OpenAlex records an APC of USD 3,090 for this journal, but prices change and institutional agreements with Springer frequently cover or discount the charge, so authors must confirm the current amount and their institution's agreement status with Springer before relying on any figure. The journal's content types on SpringerLink include original papers, review papers and book reviews, and the article stream is continuous — Springer lists newly published articles with dates throughout the year, ahead of their assembly into issues.

How to Publish in JICPR — Practical Guidance

Submissions are made through Springer's submission system for journal 40961, and manuscripts should be prepared to Springer's standard instructions for authors. Four practical judgements will most affect an author's prospects. First, position the paper in the journal's conversation: the strongest JICPR papers state early whether they are contributing to the interpretation of an Indian tradition, to contemporary philosophy in India, or to a dialogue between Indian and Western philosophy — and then deliver on that positioning. Second, argue, do not merely expound: the journal's stated tests of originality and comprehensiveness mean referees will look for objections considered and answered. Third, handle texts with scholarly care: work on pre-modern sources should use reliable editions, give translations that can be checked, and explain technical terms (keeping diacritics consistent) so that philosophers outside the specialism can follow the argument — the journal's interdisciplinary promise depends on that accessibility. Fourth, plan around the published timeline: a 94-day median to first decision, plus revision time, means JICPR should not be a last-minute submission for a fixed deadline. Book reviews and review papers are also part of the journal's life; scholars interested in contributing those should consult the journal's current calls and the editor's office through Springer's contact routes, since review commissions are not handled through the standard article pipeline in the usual way.

Who Should Read and Cite This Journal

For researchers in Indian philosophy, JICPR is close to obligatory reading: across four decades it has carried work by and about the figures who shaped modern Indian philosophy, from its founding editors D. P. Chattopadhyaya and Daya Krishna onward, and its archive is a primary source for the history of the discipline in India as well as a venue for new work. For comparative philosophers and for Western-tradition philosophers working on consciousness, self, epistemology, logic, aesthetics or philosophy of religion, it is one of the few internationally distributed journals where Indian materials are treated as live philosophical positions rather than as ethnographic background. Its downloads on SpringerLink — 28,300 in 2024 — show that this audience is real and global. Doctoral students in Indian and comparative philosophy will find its "discussions and debates" tradition especially instructive: the journal models how to disagree philosophically across traditions, which is precisely the skill the field requires.

The Journal in Its Disciplinary Landscape

JICPR occupies a position that few journals anywhere can replicate: it is simultaneously a national council's flagship and an internationally distributed Springer title, and simultaneously a venue for Sanskrit-text scholarship and for argument conducted in the idioms of contemporary analytic and Continental philosophy. Its founding generation deliberately refused to treat Indian philosophy as a museum subject. Chattopadhyaya's own work engaged philosophy of science and the history of science and technology in India; Daya Krishna spent a career arguing — often provocatively — with both the Indian tradition and its modern interpreters, and built the journal's debate sections so that such arguments would happen in public, in print, where younger scholars could learn from them. That founding refusal still structures what the journal publishes: a paper on Nyāya epistemology and a paper on consciousness studies are expected to meet the same standard of argumentative explicitness, and each is expected to be readable by the other's author. For the discipline, the journal's four decades of back issues therefore amount to a continuous record of how Indian philosophy has understood itself in dialogue — with its own classical sources, with the West, and with the modern Indian university — and libraries that hold the run hold one of the essential archives of post-independence Indian intellectual life.

Verification Notes

This record's identity was anchored to the Journals World post "Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research" (print ISSN 0970-7794, electronic ISSN 2363-9962) and cross-checked against Springer's official journal pages, which give the same title, ISSNs, aims and scope, indexing list and headline metrics, and against the ICPR-centred historical record preserved by the Contemporary Indian Philosophy Archive. OpenAlex figures were taken from the ISSN-resolved OpenAlex source record for this journal; DOAJ status was checked directly through the DOAJ search interface for both ISSNs. The stored Journals World record carried a bare numeric publisher value (4058) in place of a publisher name; the verified publisher is Springer (Springer India), publishing for the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, and that stored value is flagged in the worker report as a structured-field defect.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes the Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research? Springer publishes the journal internationally on behalf of its owner, the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, New Delhi, which holds the copyright.

When was JICPR founded? In 1983. Its first editor was Professor D. P. Chattopadhyaya, founder chairman of the ICPR; Daya Krishna later edited it until 2007 and introduced its well-known discussion and research-agenda sections.

What is JICPR's impact factor? Springer reports a Journal Impact Factor of 0.1 (2024) and a five-year Journal Impact Factor of 0.1 (2024). Philosophy journals typically have low citation rates, so the figure should be judged within the field.

Is JICPR indexed in Scopus and Web of Science? Springer lists the journal as abstracted and indexed in Scopus and in the Emerging Sources Citation Index, among many other services including PhilPapers and the Philosopher's Index.

Is the journal open access? It is a hybrid journal: the standard route is subscription publication without an author fee, and an optional paid open access route exists after acceptance. Confirm the current APC and any institutional agreement with Springer before choosing.

How long does review take? Springer reports a median of 94 days from submission to first decision.