About The Indian Journal of Medical Research

The Indian Journal of Medical Research

The Indian Journal of Medical Research (IJMR) is the flagship journal of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), India's apex body for the formulation, coordination and promotion of biomedical research. Published monthly in English and openly accessible to readers, it is one of the oldest medical journals in Asia, with a continuous history that begins in 1913. For authors, clinicians, public-health researchers and policy readers, IJMR occupies a distinctive position: it is a general biomedical journal with an explicitly Indian and regional health-priority lens, published by a national research council rather than by a commercial house, and it carries the kinds of population, infectious-disease, nutrition and health-systems research that shape practice and policy across South Asia. This profile explains what the journal is, where it came from, what it publishes, how it is indexed and evaluated, and what a prospective author should check before submitting.

At a glance

• Full title: The Indian Journal of Medical Research (IJMR)
• Owner: Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), New Delhi, India
• Print ISSN: 0971-5916
• Frequency: Monthly — 12 issues a year, in two volumes
• Language: English
• First published: 1913
• Access: Open access — contents are freely disseminated to readers
• Current publishing arrangement: Owned by ICMR; the journal's own site states it is published by Scientific Scholar. Earlier arrangements involved Medknow / Wolters Kluwer Medknow, which explains why older listings and this site's structured record name Medknow.

History: a journal founded in 1913

According to the journal's own history, IJMR began in 1913 as a quarterly, publishing four issues a year. It became bimonthly, with six issues a year, in 1958, and monthly, with twelve issues a year, in 1964 — a cadence it has kept since. That trajectory matters for readers using the archive: the early quarterly volumes are compact, while the modern monthly journal is a large, high-volume biomedical periodical. The journal describes itself as one of the oldest medical journals not only in India but probably in Asia, and its longevity is not merely ceremonial. A century of continuous publication means IJMR's backfile documents the changing disease burden of India itself, from colonial-era infectious disease and nutrition research through the epidemiological transition toward non-communicable disease, and into contemporary genomics, antimicrobial resistance and pandemic preparedness.

The journal is owned by the Indian Council of Medical Research. ICMR, headquartered in New Delhi, is the national council that funds, coordinates and promotes biomedical research in India, working through a network of institutes across the country. Ownership by a research council, rather than by a university or a commercial publisher, shapes IJMR's mission. Its stated commitment is to publishing high-quality articles in line with the priorities of ICMR in supporting and promoting biomedical research, and to disseminating quality biomedical and public-health investigations of national, regional and global interest. In practical terms, work that speaks to Indian health priorities — alongside work of wider scientific interest — is squarely within the journal's remit.

Editorial leadership has changed over the decades, as it should in a journal of this age. Dr Samiran Panda took up the editor-in-chief role in July 2022, a detail recorded in secondary histories of the journal; authors should always confirm the current editor and editorial board on the journal's own site at the time of submission, because boards rotate and the live masthead is the authoritative source. The journal's submission route has also moved: its site notes that the submission portal changed to an EditorialAssist-based system for IJMR, so authors following older instructions that point to a previous manuscript system should follow the link from the current journal homepage rather than bookmarked legacy pages.

Scope: biomedical and public-health research with an Indian priority lens

IJMR invites contributions from researchers using quantitative, qualitative or mixed-method approaches. Its scope is deliberately broad across biomedicine: original research in clinical medicine, epidemiology and public health, microbiology and infectious disease, nutrition, pharmacology, physiology, biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology, immunology, and health-systems and social issues in health all fall within its territory. The journal's own description stresses biomedical and public-health investigations of national, regional and global interest, which is a useful signal for authors deciding on fit: a well-conducted study of a globally generic question can fit, but the journal is especially receptive to work whose population, setting or policy relevance connects to India and comparable settings.

That breadth is both a strength and a submission risk. A general journal receives far more manuscripts than a specialist title, so editors must triage on significance and general interest as well as on technical soundness. A technically correct but narrowly incremental study may be better placed in a specialist journal, while a study with clear implications for disease burden, clinical practice, diagnostics, prevention or policy in India will read as a natural IJMR candidate. Authors should make that relevance explicit in the cover letter and in the discussion, rather than assuming editors will infer it from the study population alone.

The journal publishes several article types. Its site lists original research articles, review articles, short papers and short notes among its regular peer-reviewed content, and research letters are published in a correspondence section after peer review. Special issues and supplements appear in addition to the regular monthly issues; supplements have historically been issued under a separate supplement ISSN (0367-9012, recorded in secondary listings), so citations to supplement material should reproduce the supplement designation exactly as printed. Book reviews and viewpoints also appear in recent issues, reflecting the journal's role as a forum for debate in Indian medicine, not only as a repository of primary data.

What the journal publishes in practice

Recent issues illustrate the mix. Original articles span clinical trials and observational studies, diagnostic evaluations, seroprevalence and surveillance work, and laboratory investigations. Reviews — both narrative and systematic — synthesise evidence on conditions and interventions of high burden. Viewpoints and commentaries address medical education, research ethics, health policy and professional practice in India. For a reader, this means IJMR functions on three levels at once: as a primary research journal, as a review source for clinicians who need an India-relevant synthesis, and as a policy-facing forum where the implications of research for the Indian health system are argued out in print.

Infectious disease has long been a core strength, reflecting India's burden of tuberculosis, malaria, dengue, cholera and other communicable conditions, and the journal was a major venue for Indian COVID-19 research during the pandemic years — a period that bibliometric studies of the journal note for very high publication volume. Nutrition research is another historical pillar, from early deficiency studies to contemporary work on anaemia, maternal and child nutrition and double burdens of undernutrition and obesity. Non-communicable disease — diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and mental health — occupies a growing share, mirroring India's epidemiological transition. Antimicrobial resistance, One Health topics at the human–animal–environment interface, and implementation research increasingly appear as well.

Indexing, abstracting and discoverability

The journal reports an extensive indexing footprint. On its own abstracting and indexing page it lists registration with abstracting partners including Baidu Scholar, CNKI, EBSCO databases, Ex Libris Primo Central, Google Scholar, Hinari, ProQuest, TDNet and Wanfang Data, and inclusion in Index Medicus for the South-East Asia Region, Indian Science Abstracts, IndMed, MEDLINE / Index Medicus, EMBASE / Excerpta Medica, PubMed Central, SCImago Journal Ranking, Scopus, Science Citation Index Expanded and Web of Science. Inclusion in MEDLINE and PubMed Central is particularly consequential for a medical journal, because clinicians and systematic reviewers search PubMed first; an article that is not retrievable there is effectively invisible to much of its intended audience.

Indexing should always be verified live rather than assumed from a profile such as this one. Databases delist and relist titles, and coverage years matter for citation counting. The practical checks are simple: search PubMed for recent IJMR articles, confirm the title in the Scopus source list and in Clarivate's Master Journal List for Science Citation Index Expanded coverage, and check the journal's record in SCImago for its quartile history. This site's older structured record for the journal reported an H-index in the mid-110s and Q2 standing in general medicine categories; other listings report slightly different H-index values because they count different citation windows and databases. Differences of that kind are normal and are not, by themselves, a sign that any one source is wrong.

Metrics: how to read IJMR's numbers honestly

The journal's own site displays a Clarivate impact factor of 2.1, a five-year impact factor of 3.4, a Scopus CiteScore of 3.5 and an H-index of 110. Other directories, working from different years, report different values — impact-factor figures around 2.5 to 4.2 and CiteScores around 5 or higher appear in third-party listings for other citation years. None of these numbers should be quoted without its year and source. The Journal Impact Factor is a Clarivate product tied to a specific Journal Citation Reports year; CiteScore is an Elsevier Scopus product with its own four-year window; SCImago's SJR weights citations by the prestige of the citing journal. They measure related but different things, and a journal can legitimately rise on one while falling on another in the same year.

For an author choosing where to submit, the more useful questions are comparative and disciplinary. IJMR sits in the second quartile in general medicine in the commonly reported listings, which for a national general medical journal with a strong regional mission is a respectable and stable position. Its citation profile is shaped by its authorship: bibliometric analysis of the journal has found a predominantly India-based author base, with ICMR itself the largest institutional contributor, followed by institutions such as AIIMS New Delhi, and internationally co-authored papers earning citation rates close to the world average while single-institution domestic papers earn less. That pattern is a structural feature of a national journal's citation network, not a verdict on the quality of individual articles — and it suggests, practically, that international collaboration and careful positioning of a paper's wider relevance can materially affect how far an IJMR article travels.

Acceptance-rate and turnaround figures quoted on third-party sites for IJMR vary widely and are not published as an official statistic by the journal in the sources consulted for this profile, so they are not repeated here as fact. Authors who need a realistic timeline should look at the received and accepted dates printed on recent articles in their subject area, which give an honest, field-specific picture of review speed for comparable manuscripts.

Peer review, ethics and preparing a submission

IJMR is a peer-reviewed journal: original articles, reviews, short papers and research letters all pass through peer review, as the journal's own description states. Medical authors should expect the standard expectations of a MEDLINE-indexed journal to apply in full — ethics committee approval and informed consent for human research, trial registration for clinical trials, reporting-guideline compliance (CONSORT for trials, STROBE for observational studies, PRISMA for systematic reviews), data and funding statements, and conflict-of-interest declarations. Manuscripts that arrive without those elements are the ones most likely to stall at editorial screening, in this journal as in any comparable title.

Because the journal is open access and council-owned, it has historically been an accessible route for Indian researchers who need a legitimate, indexed, no-paywall venue. Authors should nevertheless confirm the current article-processing and submission terms on the official site at the moment of submission: publishing arrangements for the journal have changed over its history (Medknow-era arrangements differ from the current Scientific Scholar arrangement named on the journal's own about page), and fee, waiver and licensing terms belong to the arrangement in force when a paper is submitted, not to the one in force when an author last published there. Where a term could not be verified from the journal's public pages, this profile deliberately leaves it unstated rather than guessing.

A strong IJMR submission typically does four things. First, it states the Indian or regional relevance of the question plainly, early. Second, it uses the article type honestly — a small dataset presented as a short paper or research letter will be judged more fairly than the same dataset inflated into a full original article. Third, it situates its findings against prior Indian evidence, much of which will itself have appeared in IJMR, IndMed-indexed journals or ICMR reports. Fourth, it writes the discussion for two audiences at once: the specialist who will scrutinise the methods, and the clinician or programme manager who will decide whether the finding changes anything in practice.

Readership and place in Indian medical publishing

IJMR's readership is unusually broad for a research journal. It includes laboratory and clinical researchers across ICMR institutes and medical colleges, clinicians in general medicine and its subspecialties, public-health professionals and programme managers, postgraduate trainees who encounter it early in their reading, and international researchers working on South Asian health. Free online access through its open-access policy, together with PubMed Central availability, means its articles are read well beyond subscribing institutions — an important point for authors whose funders or institutions require open dissemination.

Within Indian medical publishing, IJMR is best understood as the national general journal: the counterpart, in role if not in scale, to the general medical weeklies and council journals of other countries. Specialist Indian journals will often be the better home for deeply technical subspecialty work, while IJMR is the natural home for work that crosses specialties, speaks to national programmes, or reports population-level evidence for India. Understanding that positioning — and writing to it — is the single most useful thing an author can do before submitting.

A note on supplements, special issues and the archive

Researchers using IJMR's archive should understand its supplements and special issues, because they are a significant part of the journal's historical output. Supplements have carried conference proceedings, ICMR task-force and consensus material and thematic collections, and they were issued under a separate supplement ISSN, so a supplement citation that omits the supplement designation can be impossible to trace. Special issues within the regular numbering, by contrast, sit inside the monthly sequence and are retrieved like ordinary issues. When searching the archive, combine the journal title with the supplement wording exactly as printed, and check IndMed and PubMed records, which treat supplement material explicitly.

The archive is also a primary source for the history of Indian public health in its own right. IJMR papers document the introduction of control programmes, the changing epidemiology of major diseases and the development of Indian research institutions across a century. Historians and policy researchers therefore cite the journal not only for findings but as evidence of what Indian medicine knew, prioritised and debated at a given moment — a second life for the backfile that few journals of its generation can match, and a further reason its open, free dissemination matters beyond the clinical readership.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Indian Journal of Medical Research the same journal as the record titled 'Indian Journal of Medical Research' without 'The'?

Yes. Both titles refer to the same serial, identified by print ISSN 0971-5916. This site carries two records for it (see the duplicate note in the verification section guidance): one under the full title with 'The' and one without. Cite the journal by its standard abbreviation, Indian J Med Res, and by ISSN, to avoid confusion.

Is IJMR open access?

Yes. The journal describes itself as an open-access peer-reviewed journal and states that ease of access is ensured by free dissemination of contents to readers. Confirm the licence terms for a specific article on the article page itself.

Who owns and who publishes IJMR?

The journal is owned by the Indian Council of Medical Research. Its own about page states that it is published by Scientific Scholar; older listings name Medknow, reflecting an earlier publishing arrangement.

What is IJMR's impact factor?

The journal's own site displays a Clarivate impact factor of 2.1 (five-year 3.4) and a Scopus CiteScore of 3.5. Third-party listings for other years report different values, so always cite the metric with its year and source.

How often does IJMR appear?

Monthly — twelve issues a year in two volumes, a pattern in place since 1964. It began as a quarterly in 1913 and was bimonthly from 1958.

How to verify this journal before you submit or cite it

Check the title and ISSN pair together on the publisher site and in at least one independent index before acting. ISSNs are the most reliable fingerprint here: titles are shortened, translated and reused, but an ISSN pair belongs to one serial record. Confirm that the editorial office address, submission system and DOI prefix on any manuscript invitation match the official journal site, and treat unsolicited invitations that use a similar title but a different ISSN or web domain with caution. Bibliometric figures change every year, so always note the year and the source of any metric you quote rather than repeating a single headline number.