Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy

About Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy

Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy: A Monthly Open-Access Review Journal for Pharmaceutical Science

Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy (abbreviated Syst. Rev. Pharm., often shortened to SRP) is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal in pharmaceutical science, published by Medknow — listed by SCImago as Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications. Its print ISSN is 0975-8453 and its electronic ISSN is 0976-2779. The journal's own site states that it is published monthly, that its first issue appeared online in December 2009, and that it serves scientists and others involved in pharmaceutical research and development in industry, academia and government. Despite a title that foregrounds systematic reviews, the journal's stated mission is broader: each issue covers review articles on drug discovery topics and publishes full-length reviews across pharmacy subjects of broad readership interest, alongside original research articles, as its recent volumes show. Understanding that breadth — and understanding where the journal's indexing record begins and ends — is essential for any author or reader weighing this title, and this profile works through both in detail.

At a Glance

History and Identity

The journal began at the end of the 2000s, a period when open-access publishing in pharmacy was expanding rapidly in India and internationally. Its own account dates the first online issue to December 2009, and SCImago's coverage record for the title begins in 2010, which fits a journal that launched online at the close of 2009 and entered the Scopus-derived record with its first full volume year. The title was published by Medknow, the Mumbai-based medical publisher that later became part of Wolters Kluwer; SCImago lists the publisher in the fuller form Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications, and the stored publisher name on this Journals World record — Medknow — is the short form of the same publishing house, not a different organisation.

The name itself deserves a careful reading. A reader who meets the title cold could reasonably expect a journal devoted exclusively to systematic reviews and meta-analyses of the kind published, for example, in evidence-synthesis journals in medicine. Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy is not that narrow. Its official scope statement says it covers and publishes articles related to pharmacy subjects including allied subjects, gives preference to articles with timely interest and newer research concepts, and only then enumerates the pharmaceutical subfields it welcomes. In practice its volumes have contained narrative and systematic-style reviews, experimental pharmacology studies, phytochemical and pharmacognosy work, clinical and pharmacy-practice research, and biomedical studies with a pharmaceutical angle. Authors should therefore evaluate fit against the scope statement and the actual contents of recent issues, rather than against the title alone, and librarians should catalogue it as a general pharmaceutical-science journal with a review emphasis, not as a pure evidence-synthesis title.

Scope in Detail

Pharmaceutics and biopharmaceutics

Formulation science is a core strand: drug delivery systems, dosage-form design, bioavailability and related work on how medicines are made, released and absorbed. Reviews in this strand typically survey a delivery technology or formulation strategy across the recent literature, while research articles report laboratory formulation and evaluation studies.

Pharmaceutical chemistry and analysis

The journal explicitly welcomes pharmaceutical chemistry and pharmaceutical analysis, including new analytical and bio-analytical techniques and study methods. That covers synthesis and characterisation work with a medicinal purpose, as well as method-development and validation studies for assaying drugs in formulations and biological samples — a staple genre in pharmacy journals from the region.

Pharmacognosy and natural products

Pharmacognosy — the study of medicines from natural sources — is named in the scope, and the journal's contents reflect it, with work on plant extracts, traditional medicinal plants and their pharmacological evaluation. A representative recent example on the journal's own site examined the medicinal uses of Tulsi (Ocimum sanctum), and experimental work on plant extracts in animal models of disease has appeared regularly. Authors in this strand should expect to document botanical identification, extraction and standardisation carefully, because review articles in the journal are read against the primary studies they summarise.

Pharmacology and biomedical research

Pharmacology and broader biomedical research form another named strand. Published examples include experimental studies in animal models — for instance a 2023 research article on Bauhinia variegata root extracts in streptozotocin-induced diabetic neuropathy in rats, measuring nociception, grip strength and oxidative-stress markers in sciatic nerve. Such papers sit alongside review articles on drug discovery topics, which the journal describes as the centrepiece of each issue.

Pharmacy practice, clinical topics and adjacent fields

Pharmacy practice and clinical subjects are in scope, and the journal also states that it publishes manuscripts related to agriculture and agricultural sciences, all aspects of plant and animal nutrition, medical law, and law and education. That final, unusually wide clause explains why occasional papers in the journal sit at some distance from core pharmacy. It does not turn the journal into a general-science title: the centre of gravity, in scope and in contents, remains pharmaceutical science, and authors well outside that centre should confirm fit with the editorial office before submitting.

Indexing and Metrics: Reading the Record Carefully

The journal's abstracting and indexing history, as summarised from its own listings, has included Abstracts on Hygiene and Communicable Diseases, CNKI, ProQuest, CAB Abstracts and CAB Direct, Chemical Abstracts Service, EBSCO databases, Excerpta Medica / Embase, Expanded Academic ASAP, Global Health, Open J-Gate, Index Copernicus and Scopus. Lists of this kind accumulate over a journal's life and should never be read as a promise about the present: services are added, renamed and discontinued, and a journal can leave a database as well as enter it.

The most important dated fact in this profile is the SCImago record. SCImago, drawing on Scopus data, lists the journal under Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics — Pharmaceutical Science, with ISSNs 0975-8453 and 0976-2779 matching the journal's own statement, and gives its coverage as 2010–2020. Its quartile history in Pharmaceutical Science in the early years moved between Q2 and Q3 — Q3 in 2011, Q2 in 2012 and 2013, and Q3 in 2014 in the SCImago table — and Scopus's own summary, as reported for the title, gave a 2019 CiteScore of 3.9. Two practical conclusions follow. First, for work published roughly between 2010 and 2020, the journal had a genuine, checkable presence in the Scopus ecosystem, and citations from that era are real and traceable. Second, coverage ending in 2020 means an author submitting today must not assume that a new article will be Scopus-indexed: the current Scopus source list, checked directly, is the only authoritative answer, and on the evidence of the SCImago coverage end-date, the default assumption should be that recent and future content falls outside Scopus until the journal demonstrates otherwise in that list. Any article processing charge decision, tenure requirement or institutional rule that depends on Scopus indexing should be settled against the live source list before submission, not against older journal web pages or third-party impact-factor sites.

No Journal Impact Factor from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports is claimed in the official material consulted for this profile, and third-party pages that attach rapidly changing impact-factor or CiteScore figures to this title should be treated as unverified. Where a metric matters, cite it with its source and year — for example, a Scopus CiteScore for a named year — rather than as a timeless property of the journal.

Peer Review and Editorial Process

The journal states that all contributions are reviewed by a peer-review process and a copyediting process, on the understanding that submissions have not been published previously and are not under consideration elsewhere, and that authors are responsible for all statements in their work and for obtaining permission to republish previously published illustrations or other material. Those are standard undertakings, and authors should honour them literally: no simultaneous submission, no republication of figures without permission, and a clear statement of any prior dissemination such as a preprint or conference version, handled according to the journal's current instructions.

Beyond that general statement, granular service details — a guaranteed time to first decision, a named acceptance rate, or a fixed review timeline — are not publicly disclosed in the material the journal publishes about itself, and this profile does not invent them. Authors who need a decision by a fixed date for a thesis, grant or promotion deadline should write to the editorial office before submitting and keep the reply; a monthly journal with a large review-article programme can have very different queues for reviews and for experimental papers.

Writing a Review That Fits This Journal

Because review articles are the journal's declared centrepiece, the most useful guidance this profile can give is about what makes a review publishable here. A strong submission states a focused question rather than a topic area, explains how the literature was searched and selected even when the article is a narrative rather than a formal systematic review, organises the evidence by mechanism, method or clinical question instead of by paper-by-paper summary, and ends with the gaps and contradictions in the evidence rather than with praise for the field. Tables that compare formulations, extracts, assays or interventions across studies earn their space; long introductory tours of general pharmacology usually do not, because the journal's readers are specialists who arrive already knowing the background.

For experimental papers, the same discipline applies in miniature: identify plant material or compounds unambiguously, describe animal or laboratory methods in enough detail for replication, report the statistics actually used, and keep conclusions inside what the model can show. An extract that changes a marker in a rat model of diabetic neuropathy is evidence about that model; the discussion should say so, and should separate it clearly from any claim about human treatment.

Open Access and Reuse

The journal is open access: its full text is readable online without a subscription, and the journal expressly allows authors to self-archive the final accepted version of their articles on any OAI-compliant institutional or subject-based repository. That self-archiving permission is valuable and specific — it covers the accepted version, in repositories — and authors should follow its terms rather than assuming that every version may be posted everywhere. Readers, in turn, can read and share links freely, while reuse of figures and text in new publications still requires the permission the journal's own statement reserves to rightsholders.

Fees require the same care. The authoritative statement of any article processing charge is the journal's current submission information at the time of submission; charges for open-access journals in this segment have changed over time, and a figure quoted on a third-party site, or remembered from an earlier volume year, is not a reliable basis for budgeting. Confirm the amount, what it covers, and when it is payable — legitimate journals invoice on a stated schedule connected to editorial decisions, and a demand for payment that arrives before any review outcome should prompt a pause and a direct check with the editorial office through the journal's own site.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Look Elsewhere

The natural authors for this journal are pharmacy researchers with a review article that synthesises a pharmaceutical topic for a broad specialist readership, and laboratory and clinical pharmacy groups whose experimental work falls squarely in pharmaceutics, pharmacology, pharmacognosy, analysis or pharmacy practice. The natural readers are the same community, plus clinicians and industry scientists who use its reviews as an entry point into a drug-discovery or formulation topic.

Authors should look elsewhere, or at least submit with open eyes, in three situations. First, where Scopus or Web of Science indexing of the new article itself is a hard requirement: the coverage evidence described above ends in 2020, so verify first. Second, where the manuscript is a formal systematic review with meta-analysis intended to change clinical guidance: a specialist evidence-synthesis or clinical journal will subject it to the methodological scrutiny its conclusions require, and its readers will expect reporting-standard compliance at a level this general pharmacy title does not foreground. Third, where the topic sits only in the journal's peripheral clauses — agriculture, law, education — with no pharmaceutical connection: fit is doubtful, and an editorial query costs less than a full submission cycle.

Verification Checklist for Readers and Authors

• Confirm the ISSNs — print 0975-8453, online 0976-2779 — on the article and on the journal site; they are the fastest guard against similarly titled and copycat titles.
• Check Scopus status in the current Scopus source list itself if indexing matters; do not rely on the journal's historical indexing list.
• Read two or three recent issues, not only the scope page, to judge whether review and research articles like yours are actually appearing.
• Confirm any processing charge, and its timing, from the journal's current official information before submitting.
• When citing metrics, name the source and the year — a 2019 CiteScore and a 2012 quartile are history, not current standing.
• Reach the journal through its own address, sysrevpharm.org, and be wary of look-alike sites or unsolicited invitations quoting its name and ISSNs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy a systematic-reviews-only journal?

No. Reviews on drug discovery topics are its stated centrepiece, but its official scope covers pharmacy subjects broadly, including experimental pharmacology, pharmacognosy, analysis and pharmacy practice, and its volumes contain original research articles as well as reviews.

Is it open access?

Yes. The journal states that it is a peer-reviewed open-access journal, that its full text is available online, and that authors may self-archive the final accepted version in OAI-compliant repositories.

Is it still indexed in Scopus?

Its Scopus-derived SCImago coverage is listed as 2010–2020. Treat current indexing as a question to verify in the live Scopus source list before relying on it; this profile could not verify current Scopus coverage from an official current source list entry.

How often does it publish?

Monthly, according to the journal's own site. Note that older descriptions of the title described a less frequent schedule; the journal's present self-description is monthly.

Who publishes it?

Medknow Publications — listed in full by SCImago as Wolters Kluwer Medknow Publications, based in India.

A Note on the Backfile

The backfile is the part of this journal that rewards the most careful reading. Because the title has published continuously since the end of 2009 and reached at least its fifteenth volume by 2024 on its own site, a literature search on a pharmaceutical topic will often surface its reviews among the first results, helped by open access and by the breadth of the scope. That visibility cuts both ways. A well-constructed review from the journal's Scopus-covered years can be a genuinely useful map of a formulation, extract or drug class, with references that lead onward to the primary literature. A reader should still follow those references rather than citing the review for a claim the review itself borrowed, should check the year and the methods of any pooled or compared result, and should remember that a journal which also publishes primary experimental work asks its reviewers to judge two different genres. Used that way — as a map and a starting point, checked against primary sources — the backfile is a practical resource for pharmacy students, formulators and clinicians alike, freely readable without any subscription barrier.

Conclusion

Systematic Reviews in Pharmacy is a long-running, open-access pharmaceutical-science journal with a genuine early record in the Scopus ecosystem, a broad pharmacy scope anchored by review articles on drug discovery, and an unusually wide set of peripheral topics that authors should treat as exceptions rather than the rule. Its value to a reader is immediate free access to a large backfile of pharmacy reviews and studies. Its value to an author depends on a clear-eyed check of the two things that have changed since its strongest indexing years — current database coverage and current charges — both of which can be verified in minutes from primary sources. Do those checks, write the focused and honest review or study the scope actually promises, and the journal can be a reasonable home for pharmaceutical work that does not depend for its purpose on a current indexing guarantee.