Indian Pediatrics
Indian Pediatrics is the official journal of the Indian Academy of Pediatrics (IAP), published monthly in English from India since January 1964. A double-blind, peer-reviewed medical journal with its permanent editorial office in New Delhi and its publishing handled by Springer India on behalf of the Academy, it showcases research, clinical work and policy contributions on the health of neonates, children and adolescents, with a deliberate priority for problems that matter most in India and other developing countries. It is one of the most widely circulated specialty medical journals in the country, supplied to Academy members and to subscribing individuals and institutions, and it is indexed in the leading international biomedical databases.
Origins: the unification of Indian pediatrics
The journal cannot be separated from the unification of India's pediatric profession. In the mid-1940s there were barely fifteen pediatricians in the whole country, concentrated mainly in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata, following the establishment of the first department of pediatrics at J. J. Hospital, Mumbai, in 1928 and the first independent children's hospital, the B. J. Wadia Hospital for Children, in Mumbai in 1929. As the specialty grew, two national associations emerged: the Association of Pediatricians of India, founded in Mumbai in 1950 by Dr George Coelho, and the Indian Pediatric Society in Kolkata, associated with Dr K. C. Chaudhuri, who had founded his society in 1948.
Through the 1950s senior pediatricians pressed for a single national body. A committee formed after the 1960 Jaipur conference, and a joint committee that first met at Hyderabad in March 1962 under the convenorship of Dr Sisir K. Bose, laid down the principles for a united academy. In 1963 the two organisations amalgamated to form the Indian Academy of Pediatrics, registered as a society in Mumbai on 3 December 1963, and the Academy's first national conference was held in Pune in 1964. Indian Pediatrics was created as the new Academy's official journal by incorporating the two predecessor journals — the Indian Journal of Child Health and the Journal of the Indian Pediatric Society — and it commenced publication in January 1964 from Calcutta, as the merged Academy's central office was established in Mumbai.
The publisher: the Indian Academy of Pediatrics
The IAP describes itself as the only association of pediatricians in India, committed to the improvement of the health and well-being of all children and to achieving optimum growth, development and health in the physical, emotional, mental, social and spiritual realms of childhood, irrespective of background. Springer, the journal's co-publisher, records an Academy of more than 44,000 members with 337 branches, while the Academy itself has claimed some 50,000 members as of 2025 — growth from the roughly 140 to 145 founding members of 1963 that mirrors the transformation of pediatrics in India from a handful of practitioners into a mass specialty. The Academy's secretariat is in Mumbai, while, as its official site has long noted, Delhi is the seat of its official publication, Indian Pediatrics; the Academy also publishes the Indian Journal of Practical Pediatrics from Chennai.
Aims and editorial priorities
The journal's stated general objective is to promote the science and practice of pediatrics. Its author instructions, updated in April 2026, describe a monthly, double-blinded, peer-reviewed journal published every month since 1964 that endeavours to showcase the latest advances and research in child health, policy and advocacy, publishing outstanding research and clinical work and other important contributions relating to the health of neonates, children and adolescents. Within that remit it gives priority to reports of outstanding clinical and experimental work, and to important contributions on common and topical problems in India and the developing countries — an editorial stance that has consistently distinguished it from pediatrics journals oriented mainly to wealthy health systems.
Its specific objectives, as summarised in journal directories, are to publish original, relevant, well-researched peer-reviewed articles on child health; to provide continuing education supporting informed clinical decisions and research; to foster responsible and balanced debate on controversial issues affecting child health, including non-clinical areas such as medical education, ethics, law, environment and economics; and to maintain a high standard of ethical medical journalism in a publication that is timely and credible.
Contents of the journal
A typical volume of Indian Pediatrics mixes many forms of medical writing. The journal publishes original articles, guidelines, consensus statements, position papers and review articles; clinical case letters and research letters; correspondence relating to published articles; images; announcements of meetings, courses and appointments; invited commentaries and updates; debates; a section on ethics; articles on medical education; clinico-pathological conferences; and book reviews. That mixture is functional: guidelines and consensus statements translate evidence into Indian practice, case letters and images train clinical recognition, and the debate and ethics sections give the profession a forum for questions that research papers alone cannot settle.
The subject matter spans the whole of child health as practised in India — neonatal care, infectious disease, nutrition, growth and development, adolescent health, and the subspecialties that have developed within the Academy, which maintains numerous pediatric subspecialty chapters and interest groups whose work feeds into the journal's pages.
Peer review, ethics and publishing standards
Indian Pediatrics follows the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors for the conduct, reporting, editing and publication of scholarly work in medical journals, and it is a member journal of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Its peer review is double-blinded, meaning that authors and reviewers are not identified to one another. These commitments place the journal within the mainstream governance structures of international medical publishing, an important assurance for a journal that publishes clinical guidelines and position papers which practitioners may apply directly in care.
Indexing, metrics and reach
The journal is abstracted and indexed in a long list of international services recorded in its author instructions, including Medline, PubMed, Scopus, the Science Citation Index Expanded, EMBASE, Current Contents/Clinical Medicine, CAB Abstracts, EBSCO, ProQuest, Google Scholar, Dimensions and many others. Its print ISSN is 0019-6061 and its electronic ISSN is 0974-7559. The journal reported an impact factor of 1.5 for 2024 in its author guidance, and stated that its website consistently receives around five million hits per month — a figure consistent with its long reputation for an unusually strong web presence; a fiftieth-anniversary history of the Academy recorded that the journal's website was already receiving over a million hits a month a decade earlier and that the journal was accessed by more than 2,700 institutions worldwide.
Circulation figures have grown with the Academy. Earlier journal descriptions recorded a circulation of about 17,500 copies; more recent descriptions put print and electronic circulation at about 28,000. The journal is provided complimentary to members of the IAP and by subscription to individuals and institutions, which means its primary readership is the practising pediatric profession of India itself, supplemented by institutional and international readers online.
The journal and the Academy's history
Because the journal began with the Academy, its volumes form a parallel history of Indian pediatrics. A historical perspective published in the journal in January 2013, marking the Academy's first half-century, described how Indian Pediatrics maintained a reliable monthly schedule, reaching readers in the third week of every month, and how manuscript submissions rose from about 750 to about 1,200 a year over a six-year period, while its impact factor rose from 0.75 in 2008 to 1.048 in 2012. The same account called the journal the Academy's ornament — a sign of the place the publication holds in the institution's identity. Anniversaries have repeatedly been marked in its pages, and the Academy's standing in national life was recognised in 2013 with a commemorative postage stamp dedicated to the Indian Academy of Pediatrics.
Distinguishing Indian Pediatrics from the Indian Journal of Pediatrics
Readers outside India sometimes confuse Indian Pediatrics with the older Indian Journal of Pediatrics, founded in 1933 by Dr K. C. Chaudhuri. They are separate publications: the Indian Journal of Pediatrics belongs to the Dr K. C. Chaudhuri Foundation and predates the Academy by three decades, while Indian Pediatrics, founded in 1964, is the Academy's own official organ, formed from the journals of the two associations that merged to create the IAP. The distinction matters bibliographically — the two titles have different ISSNs, publishers' arrangements and editorial offices — and historically, since Dr Chaudhuri's earlier journal was a product of the Kolkata society that became one of the Academy's two parents.
Digital presence
The journal maintains its own website at indianpediatrics.net, carrying current issues, author instructions and archives, alongside its presence on Springer's journal platform. Its heavy online traffic — measured in millions of hits a month — reflects both the size of India's pediatric workforce and the journal's practice of making clinically useful material, including guidelines and consensus documents of direct relevance to Indian practice, readily accessible. For many practitioners in smaller towns, the online journal is the most immediate connection to the Academy's scientific work.
Significance
Indian Pediatrics occupies a particular niche: it is simultaneously a research journal, a continuing-education instrument for tens of thousands of practitioners, and the official voice of India's pediatric profession. Its editorial priority for the common and topical problems of India and the developing world has kept its pages focused on the conditions that dominate child health in South Asia, while its indexing, peer-review standards and Springer publishing partnership keep it visible internationally. More than sixty years after its first issue appeared from Calcutta in January 1964, it remains the central periodical of Indian pediatrics.
