Indian Drugs
Overview
Indian Drugs is the monthly scientific journal of the Indian Drug Manufacturers' Association (IDMA), published from Mumbai since 1963. It is a peer-reviewed journal of the pharmaceutical sciences, carrying original research papers, review articles and short notes from researchers in India and abroad. In a directory of magazines it belongs to the scholarly end of the spectrum: its readers are scientists, academics and research-minded industry professionals, and its contents are research manuscripts rather than news or commentary.
The journal's founding purpose, as the association describes it, was to give the Indian pharmaceutical research community an excellent opportunity to publish original research manuscripts without charging any fees — a mission the journal frames as part of nation building. More than six decades later, Indian Drugs remains a recognised venue for pharmaceutical research, indexed in major international databases and distributed as a membership privilege to the companies and institutions of the IDMA.
History and Founding
Indian Drugs began its journey in 1963, when India's pharmaceutical industry and its research base were both still young. The journal was created by the Indian Drug Manufacturers' Association as its scientific publication, and it has been published monthly ever since — older journal descriptions note its tradition of appearing on the 28th day of every month. Its print ISSN, 0019-462X, belongs to that founding era, and an electronic ISSN, 3048-7161, has since been registered for the online version.
Continuity is the striking feature of the journal's history. Through the transformation of Indian pharma from a small domestic industry into one of the world's largest suppliers of medicines, Indian Drugs has maintained the same basic model: monthly issues, peer review by honorary expert referees, no publication charges to authors, and distribution anchored in the association's membership. Journal metrics services record its coverage in Scopus from 1989 onward, with an h-index of 32 recorded in recent journal-ranking data — evidence of a substantial, cited body of published work.
Publisher and Editorial Home
The publisher is the Indian Drug Manufacturers' Association, the industry body for Indian drug manufacturers, whose address for the journal is given as 102B, A Wing, Poonam Chambers, Dr. Annie Besant Road, Worli, Mumbai 400 018, Maharashtra. The journal's editor-in-chief in recent listings is Dr. Gopakumar Nair.
Editorial decisions rest with the editors, but the journal is explicit that they depend on a team of expert referees. Manuscripts are scrutinised by this referee panel and by the Editorial Advisory Board, and the referees work on an honorary basis — a point the journal acknowledges with unusual warmth, crediting their love of the subject and commitment to pharmaceutical research and development in India. That volunteer-expert model is the classic structure of society publishing, and Indian Drugs is a textbook example of it operating at national scale.
Scope and Subject Areas
Indian Drugs publishes original research papers, review articles and short notes in five broad disciplines of the pharmaceutical sciences: pharmaceutics; pharmacology; pharmaceutical analysis; pharmaceutical chemistry; and pharmacognosy and phytochemistry. Together these span the life of a medicine — from the chemistry of drug substances and the study of medicinal plants, through formulation and analysis, to the biological evaluation of effects.
Journal classification services place the title in drug discovery, pharmaceutical science and pharmacology. The scope is deliberately comprehensive rather than niche: as the association's own journal, Indian Drugs is intended to serve the whole research community of Indian pharmacy, and its five-discipline structure ensures that academic departments and industry laboratories of very different kinds can all publish within its pages.
Peer Review and Publication Model
The journal receives about 450 to 500 papers a year, a number of them from international institutions, and accepts only about 30 to 35 percent of submissions for publication. That selectivity, combined with monthly publication, indicates a substantial flow of evaluated research rather than a thin proceedings-style journal.
Two features of the model deserve emphasis. First, authors are not charged fees — the journal's founding commitment, maintained as a point of principle, removes the pay-to-publish barrier that shapes much contemporary open-access publishing. Second, soft copies of the journal are provided to institutes and colleges and to the journal's reviewers in India, extending its reach into the academic system that supplies most of its authors and readers.
Frequency and Circulation
Indian Drugs is published monthly, with twelve issues a year. Its print circulation is given in the journal's current descriptive material as 2,200 copies; earlier listings quoted lower figures of 1,500 and 1,800 copies, reflecting growth over time. Copies are distributed to all IDMA members as a members' privilege.
Beyond the membership, the journal is available by subscription to members of the industry, university libraries and government departments — the three audiences whose shelves a pharmaceutical research journal most needs to reach. The combination of association distribution and institutional subscription gives Indian Drugs a stable, professionally targeted circulation rather than a commercial newsstand one.
Indexing and Recognition
For a research journal, indexing is the measure of standing, and Indian Drugs is widely indexed. Listings record it in Scopus, EMBASE, EBSCO, Google Scholar, SCImago and the UGC-CARE list in India, and older abstracting lists add International Pharmaceutical Abstracts, Index Copernicus, WorldCat and a range of journal directories. Inclusion in Scopus and EMBASE places its articles within the international discovery systems that researchers actually search, while UGC-CARE listing matters for Indian academics whose career progression depends on publishing in recognised journals.
SCImago-based data record the journal in the fourth quartile of its categories with a long Scopus coverage history — a profile typical of a solid national society journal: not a high-impact international flagship, but a durable, legitimate venue whose papers are indexed, archived and citable.
Audience and Readership
The journal's readers are the research community of the pharmaceutical sciences: faculty and postgraduate researchers in pharmacy institutions, scientists in industry research and development and quality functions, and the librarians who serve them. Distribution to government departments adds regulators and policy-adjacent readers. Because submissions arrive from across India and from institutions abroad, authorship and readership overlap heavily — the normal pattern for a disciplinary journal.
For IDMA's member companies, the journal is also a window on the academic research base from which the industry recruits and with which it collaborates. Its monthly arrival on members' desks, as a privilege of membership, keeps the association's industrial and scientific identities joined together.
Digital Presence
Indian Drugs is present online through its website at indiandrugsonline.org, which carries the journal's description, submission and subscription information and access to its content; journal databases record free availability of text in PDF form, with some material for subscribers. The registration of an electronic ISSN confirms the journal's formal existence as an online as well as a print publication.
As with many long-running society journals, digitisation has principally worked through the indexing services: a researcher encountering Indian Drugs today is most likely to meet it through Scopus, EMBASE, Google Scholar or the UGC-CARE list, and to read individual articles as PDFs rather than browsing whole issues.
Role in Pharmaceutical Research Publishing
Indian Drugs matters because of what it represents in Indian science publishing: an industry association sustaining a free-to-publish, peer-reviewed research journal for over sixty years. In an era of article processing charges and predatory journals, its model — association-funded, referee-run, subscription- and membership-supported — offers Indian researchers, including those without grants, a reputable national venue for their work.
Its five-discipline scope mirrors the structure of Indian pharmacy education itself, and its presence on the UGC-CARE list ties it into the incentive system of Indian academia. Few Indian journals of any field can claim an unbroken monthly run from 1963; in pharmaceutical sciences, Indian Drugs is a foundational institution.
How to Read and Subscribe
Institutions and individuals can subscribe to Indian Drugs directly: it is available by subscription to industry members, university libraries and government departments, while IDMA members receive it as part of their membership. Soft copies are supplied to institutes, colleges and reviewers in India. Researchers can consult its articles through the journal's website and through the major indexing databases in which it is listed.
Prospective authors should note the journal's essentials: monthly publication, peer review by expert referees, an acceptance rate of roughly a third of submissions, and no publication fees. For the Indian pharmaceutical research community, those terms have made Indian Drugs a first-choice national journal since 1963.
