Paykareh

About Paykareh

About Paykareh

Paykareh is a quarterly journal of art and art history published electronically by the Faculty of Arts of Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, in Khuzestan, Iran. Its full imprint, carried on its own articles, is “Paykareh: Journal of Art Faculty, Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz”. It publishes in Persian (Farsi) and English, accepts research and review articles, and centres on art and history — especially the visual arts — together with comparative and interdisciplinary work connecting art with history, and a stated special attention to art education and its applications. Its identifiers are ISSN 2322-4622 and e-ISSN 2588-6789. The journal began publishing in 2012, holds grade A from the Publications Commission of Iran’s Ministry of Science, Research and Technology as reported by its university, is indexed in the Islamic World Science Citation Center (ISC) database, follows the ethics framework of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) as reported by the university, and — in a development announced by Shahid Chamran University in May 2025 — received a Scopus international profile, one of only three Iranian journals in architecture and art reported to have done so in the Ministry’s 2024 recognition round.

The journal’s name and its contents announce its centre of gravity: Iranian and Islamic art studied closely, object by object and monument by monument. Its archive, as visible in the Scientific Information Database (SID) listings consulted for this profile, is rich in exactly that work — Timurid woodcarving and the carved doors of mosques and shrines; Seljuk minarets in Isfahan and the brickwork, tile, and inscription programmes that decorate them; the Grivar inscription of the Davazdah Imam Mausoleum in Yazd analysed letter by letter; Persian miniature painting in the Shiraz school, from illustrated Shāhnāmeh manuscripts to the Samak-e Ayyār; historic carpets such as the Lilian and Reyhan weavings of Khomeyn; cosmological motifs in Seljuk art; fire symbolism in Median and Achaemenid material; postage stamps and endangered species as visual culture; and art-education studies, including teaching painting to children through Vygotsky’s theory of the zone of proximal development. That spread — from epigraphy and woodcarving to classroom practice — is the journal in miniature: historical and formal analysis of Iranian visual heritage, alongside applied work on how art is taught and used.

Aims and Editorial Priorities

Shahid Chamran University’s announcement of the journal’s Scopus profile states its aims in terms worth quoting in substance: the journal aims to publish new and practical artistic and art-historical articles that are oriented toward solving problems, it gives special attention to art education and its application, it attends particularly to interdisciplinary topics joining art and history, and its priorities include completing gaps in knowledge on those topics and offering new answers to previous research. Read alongside the archive, those aims explain the journal’s reviewing taste. A purely appreciative essay on a famous monument is a weaker fit than a study that brings new documentation — photographs, measurements, transcriptions, comparisons — to a defined problem: the dating of an inscription style, the workshop geography of a craft, the iconography of a motif across media, or the measured effect of a teaching method. The journal’s own portal states its purpose, as summarised in a published citation-analysis study of the journal’s first decade, as raising the level of knowledge and presenting artistic achievements; that study, analysing the articles published from 1391 to 1400 in the Persian calendar (2012–2021), evaluated authorship, citation behaviour, and research trends across the journal’s first ten years — a sign of a journal that is itself an object of bibliometric attention inside Iran’s research system.

Publisher — and a Garbled Record Corrected

The Journals World structured record stored a purely numeric publisher value, “3629”, for this post. That value is garbled and names no publisher. The verifiable publisher is the Faculty of Arts of Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz: the journal’s own articles carry that faculty imprint, the university’s official news service reports the journal as the Faculty of Arts’ journal, and SID listings describe it in the same terms. Shahid Chamran University is a major public university in Ahvaz, the capital of Khuzestan province in south-western Iran, and its Faculty of Arts provides the journal’s editorial home, its peer-review community, and its institutional continuity since 2012. Country (Iran) in the stored record is consistent with these sources; the numeric publisher string is not, and correcting that string to the faculty and university is the single most important structured-data fix this post needs. Authors should address all submission steps through the journal’s official portal at Shahid Chamran University (paykareh.scu.ac.ir) and should treat any submission route offered by an unrelated site as unverified.

Publication Pattern, Languages, and Article Types

The university describes Paykareh as a quarterly published electronically, in Farsi and English, accepting research and review articles focused on art and history, especially the visual arts, together with comparative studies and related interdisciplinary topics. The archive bears that description out: SID issue listings show a steady quarterly rhythm across volumes — volume 9 in 2020, volume 12 in 2023, volume 13 in 2024, with issues numbered continuously into the thirties — and articles presented with English titles and abstracts alongside their Persian texts, the standard Iranian scholarly pattern that makes Persian-language research discoverable internationally while keeping the full argument in the language of its primary community. For an author outside Iran considering this venue, the language arrangement is the central practical fact: a full text must be publishable in Persian or in English to the journal’s standard, with bilingual metadata, and the journal’s readership will approach the work first as a contribution to Iranian and Islamic art studies, whatever the author’s home discipline. Article lengths, formatting templates, and current submission requirements should be confirmed on the live journal portal at the time of submission; where this profile could not verify a mechanical detail from the sources in hand, it leaves the detail to that live check rather than inventing one.

Standing, Indexing, and Ethics Framework

Three distinct layers of standing should be kept separate, because summaries often blur them. First, national standing: the university reports that the journal holds grade A from the Publications Commission of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology — the top band in Iran’s domestic journal evaluation — and is indexed in the ISC database, the citation index that underpins much research evaluation in Iran and the wider region. Second, ethics and governance: the university reports that the journal is subject to the rules of COPE and follows the executive regulations of Iran’s law on preventing and combating fraud in scientific works — the framework within which its peer review and misconduct handling operate. Third, international indexing: in May 2025 the university announced that the Faculty of Arts had succeeded in obtaining a Scopus international profile for Paykareh, noting that in the Ministry’s 2024 honours for top researchers and technologists, three Iranian journals in architecture and art had received such a profile, Paykareh among them. That announcement is a publisher claim reported here as such; a researcher whose institution requires Scopus coverage evidenced at a particular date should confirm the title’s live status in the Scopus source list itself, since profiles are activated, populated, and sometimes corrected over time. The journal’s presence in SID, which hosts its issue archive with English-language article pages, gives its contents a second, durable discovery route independent of commercial indexes.

Metrics — an Honest Account

This journal requires unusual candour about numbers. The stored Journals World record gives an h-index of 2 and coverage of 2020–2025. OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint for 2322-4622, returned a source record (S7407060834) carrying both of the journal’s ISSNs — but with zero works, zero citations, and an h-index of zero attached to it, a record whose counts plainly do not describe a journal that has published quarterly since 2012 and whose archive is fully visible in SID. Those zero figures are therefore not cited anywhere in this profile as the journal’s performance: they describe a matching failure in one aggregator, not the journal. A DOAJ search by ISSN through the DOAJ public API during this profile’s research returned one matching record for the journal: it records the title in Persian script with the alternative title Paykareh, print ISSN 2322-4622 and e-ISSN 2588-6789, publisher Shahid Chamran University in Iran, languages Persian and English, open access from 2012, a CC BY-NC licence, no article processing charge and no other charges, author-retained copyright, double anonymous peer review, plagiarism detection in place, keywords spanning visual arts, graphics, sculpture, painting, photography, and Islamic arts, and a publication time of 16 weeks as recorded in that record. That DOAJ record is a primary verification route for this journal and corrects any impression given by thinner aggregator coverage. The defensible summary is narrower and more useful: Paykareh is a nationally top-graded (grade A, per its university), ISC-indexed Iranian art quarterly with a substantial Persian-language archive since 2012, a university-announced Scopus profile from 2025 whose live state readers should verify in Scopus directly, and international aggregator coverage that is currently too incomplete to support citation figures of any kind. Any website that attaches a precise impact factor or a confident citation total to this title is exceeding what the verifiable sources support, and authors should discount such figures accordingly. Influence for this journal is better evidenced directly: read its archive in SID, observe its citation inside Iranian art-historical scholarship, and weigh its grade and its faculty base.

Themes an Author Will Find — and Gaps an Author Can Fill

Reading across the issues consulted, the journal’s strengths cluster in five areas. First, Iranian architectural ornament and epigraphy: inscriptions, minarets, carved wood, tile, and brickwork, studied with field documentation. Second, Persian painting and the arts of the book: miniature schools, manuscript illustration, and character and costume design in narrative painting. Third, craft and material culture: carpets, woodwork, and regional production centres, treated technically as well as aesthetically. Fourth, iconography and symbolism across periods, from pre-Islamic motifs to Seljuk cosmology. Fifth, art education and applied visual studies, from children’s painting pedagogy to contemporary visual media such as stamps. Gaps visible from the same reading — and therefore opportunities for a well-prepared submission — include comparative work that places Iranian material in sustained dialogue with neighbouring traditions, conservation-science and digital-documentation studies of the monuments the journal already publishes descriptively, and reception studies tracing how historic motifs are reused in contemporary Iranian design. A submission that documents something new, in photographs, transcriptions, or measured drawings, and argues a defined problem to a conclusion, matches both the journal’s stated problem-solving aim and the pattern of its accepted archive.

Is This Journal Right for Your Work?

Choose Paykareh when your research concerns Iranian or Islamic art, architecture, crafts, or art education, when you can publish in Persian or in English with bilingual metadata, and when your primary audience is the Iranian and regional scholarly community that reads, cites, and builds on this literature — with growing international discoverability through SID’s English article pages and the university-announced Scopus profile. Its grade A national standing carries real weight inside Iran’s academic evaluation system, which is precisely where most of its authors build their careers. Think carefully when your institution requires citation metrics evidenced from a named international database at a named date — verify the live Scopus position first, and do not rely on aggregator summaries for this title — or when your work has no genuine connection to the journal’s art-and-history centre, since its reviewers are specialists who will judge fit strictly. Fees, timelines, and formatting requirements are not stated in the sources verified for this profile and are recorded here as could not be verified; confirm all three on the official portal before submitting, and keep the university’s own announcements as your reference for the journal’s standing claims.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Paykareh? ISSN 2322-4622 and e-ISSN 2588-6789, as carried on the journal’s records.

Who publishes Paykareh? The Faculty of Arts of Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz, Iran. The numeric publisher value in the older Journals World record is garbled.

When did it start, and how often does it appear? Publishing since 2012, quarterly, electronically, per its university and its SID archive.

In which languages does it publish? Farsi (Persian) and English, with English titles and abstracts supporting discovery, per the university’s description.

What is its national standing? Grade A from the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology Publications Commission, and indexed in ISC — both as reported by Shahid Chamran University.

Is it in Scopus? The university announced a Scopus international profile for the journal in May 2025. Verify the live Scopus source list for the current state before relying on it.

What citation metrics are verified? None are cited in this profile: the OpenAlex record matched by ISSN carried zero counts that contradict the journal’s visible archive, so its figures were rejected as a matching failure rather than reported.

Reading the Archive Closely — What Strong Paykareh Articles Do

The articles sampled for this profile share a working pattern that prospective authors can imitate. They begin from a defined object or a defined site — a carved door, a mausoleum inscription, a minaret programme, a carpet design, an illustrated manuscript, a set of stamps — and they document it before they interpret it: the object's location, date, materials, and condition are established, photographs or transcriptions are presented, and only then does comparison and argument begin. Their methods are named plainly, most often descriptive-analytical, built on library sources combined, where the subject allows, with field observation. Their conclusions return to the object: which workshop, which period style, which symbolic programme, which teaching effect the evidence supports. An author preparing a submission should test a draft against that pattern honestly. Is the object fully identified? Is the documentation — images, measurements, transcriptions, or classroom data — present in the manuscript itself rather than promised? Are the comparisons drawn from published, checkable sources? Does the conclusion claim only what the documentation carries? A manuscript that passes those tests in Persian or in English, with clean bilingual titles, abstracts, and keywords, speaks the journal's native scholarly language whatever the author's home country.

Two further opportunities deserve emphasis for international readers of this profile. First, the journal's art-education strand is real and continuing — the Vygotsky-based study of teaching painting to children, sampled in the archive, sits naturally beside the historical work because the faculty that publishes the journal also teaches the practitioners of the region. Studies of museum education, heritage interpretation for school audiences, and studio pedagogy grounded in documented practice therefore have a home here that purely historical art journals do not offer. Second, Khuzestan and south-western Iran are under-represented in the Anglophone art-historical literature relative to Isfahan, Shiraz, or Tehran; careful documentation of the region's monuments, crafts, and collections, published in this journal with English abstracts, enters both the national record and international discovery systems. Authors in possession of such documentation — including scholars who surveyed a monument for another purpose — should consider that a well-built Paykareh article may be the most durable form in which that documentation can be published and preserved.

Verification Notes for Librarians and Evaluators

Because aggregator coverage of this title is incomplete, librarians and evaluators should verify it through primary routes: the journal portal at Shahid Chamran University for current issues, masthead, and submission rules; its DOAJ record for licence, charge, and review-process facts; SID for the back archive with English article pages; the ISC system for its national indexing position; and the live Scopus source list for the current state of the international profile the university announced in 2025. A catalogue record should carry both ISSNs (2322-4622 and 2588-6789), the Faculty of Arts of Shahid Chamran University of Ahvaz as publisher, the 2012 start year, quarterly frequency, and Persian and English as languages. Any record that instead carries a numeric publisher string, a different university, or citation totals drawn from the empty aggregator record discussed in this profile's metrics section should be corrected against those primary routes before it is used in an evaluation.

A Final Word on Fit

Fit, for this journal, is ultimately a question of respect for the object of study: the editors, reviewers, and readers of Paykareh are people who carve, conserve, teach, and write the visual culture the journal documents, and they reward manuscripts that add verifiable knowledge about it. Bring documentation, name the problem, and argue to a conclusion the evidence supports, and the journal's national standing and growing international visibility will work for the article for years.