A New Ranking System for Indian Legal Journals

The University Grants Commission (UGC) recently withdrew its UGC-CARE (Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics) list, a tool previously used by Indian academic institutions to validate the quality of journals for faculty recruitment and promotion. While the CARE list has faced criticism from parts of the academic community, its removal has created a vacuum, leaving universities and researchers without a standardised benchmark to ascertain journal quality. This issue is particularly pronounced for Indian legal journals, most of which are not indexed in global databases like Scopus or Web of Science. Only three generalist law journals from India—Jindal Global Law Review (JGLR, Springer), Indian Journal of Law and Justice (University of North Bengal), and the Indian Law Review (Taylor & Francis)—all edited by faculty, are indexed in Scopus. The UGC’s move, thus, shifts the validation burden entirely onto individual universities, raising concerns about inconsistent standards, subjectivity, and an increased risk of researchers engaging with predatory publishers.

In this post, we introduce the Indian Law Journals Ranking System (ILJRS), an open and systematic ranking system tailored specifically for Indian law journals. Our methodology employs a multi-factor approach, considering elements such as the credentials and affiliations of contributing authors, available citation metrics, and practices like transparent peer-review processes and editorial standards. In the initial phase of this project, we indexed and ranked 29 generalist law journals, including both faculty-edited and student-edited publications.

The ILJRS can serve as a valuable signal of a journal’s quality and standing. It can assist authors in selecting publication venues and help institutions distinguish between credible and less-reputable journals. This ranking forms part of a broader effort to map and understand the landscape of legal research in India, aiming to provide useful benchmarks that support the academic community in navigating the Indian legal research environment.

Selection of Journals

For the first phase of ILJRS, our selection process focused on identifying the primary, generalist law journals associated with leading law schools in India. We began by systematically reviewing the journals published by all National Law Universities (NLUs), selecting the flagship publication from each that fit our generalist criteria. Subsequently, we examined the journals from the top 20 law schools identified through established national rankings (NIRF, IIRF) and, again, selected the most appropriate generalist journals. In instances where a law school published both faculty-edited and student-edited journals meeting our criteria, both were included in our sample. To provide a valuable benchmark, we also incorporated the Scopus-indexed Indian Law Review into our analysis corpus. We acknowledge that significant research may certainly be found in Indian legal journals outside this sample. Our focus in this phase is to create a defined and manageable sample.

For data collection, we aimed to gather all journal issues published between 2014 and 2024 that could be downloaded through proprietary and public databases. This process revealed several challenges. Some journals, despite indicating regular publication schedules, have released issues sporadically during this period. For example, Symbiosis Law Review and Symbiosis Student Law Review, the generalist law journals of Symbiosis Law School, Pune, have published only one issue between them in the past ten years. In other cases, journal archives are not available online through any accessible platform. For example, past issues of the NLUO Law Journal (the National Law University Odisha) are not available on its website. Similarly, while past issues of the Journal of NLUD (the National Law University Delhi) are viewable online, the site does not allow users to download them for analysis. We attempted to contact the editorial teams and associated law school libraries directly to request access to missing issues, but these efforts were largely unsuccessful, yielding few responses. Consequently, journals for which we could download fewer than three issues within the specified timeframe were excluded from the final analysis. In total, we included 29 journals in this phase of the project.

To create the dataset for our analysis, we split each journal volume into individual PDF files, applied optical character recognition (OCR) where needed, and coded every article into a dataset using a mix of manual review and automated tools. Altogether, we indexed and coded 3,745 articles from 360 issues.

TABLE 1: LIST OF JOURNALS INDEXED

No	Journal Name	Journal Abbreviation	Publishing University	Start Year	Issues Indexed	Articles Indexed	Faculty/ Student
1	Amity Law Review	ALR	Amity University, Noida	2000	11	122	F
2	Christ University Law Journal	Christ U. L. J.	Christ (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru	2012	22	135	S
3	CNLU Law Journal	CNLU L.J.	Chanakya National Law University, Patna	2010	7	232	S
4	Delhi Law Review	DLR	Faculty of Law, University of Delhi	1972	4	94	F
5	Delhi Law Review (Student Edition)	DSLR	Campus Law Centre, University of Delhi	2004	3	57	S
6	DNLU Student Law Journal	DNLU St. L. J.	Dharmashastra National Law University, Jabalpur	2022	3	30	S
7	GNLU Student Law Review	GNLU St. L. Rev.	Gujarat National Law University, Gandhinagar	2020	5	45	S
8	Indian Law Review	ILR	Taylor & Francis (with Indian academic board)	2017	25	157	F
9	Jindal Global Law Review	JGLR	Jindal Global Law School, OP Jindal Global University	2009	20	241	F
10	Journal of the Indian Law Institute	JILI	Indian Law Institute, New Delhi	1958	42	290	F
11	KIIT Student Law Review	KIIT St. L. Rev.	KIIT School of Law, Bhubaneswar	2014	9	73	S
12	Lexigentia-International Law Journal of Lloyd Law College	Lexigentia	Lloyd Law College, Greater Noida	2015	3	31	S
13	Nalsar Law Review	NALSAR L. Rev.	NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad	2004	3	52	F
14	NALSAR Student Law Review	NALSAR St. L. Rev.	NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad	2005	6	96	S
15	National Law School Journal	NLSJ	NLSIU, Bengaluru	1989	6	48	F
16	National Law School of India Review	NLSIR	NLSIU, Bengaluru	1988	15	222	S
17	Nirma University Law Journal	NULJ	Nirma University, Ahmedabad	2011	15	101	S
18	NLIU Law Review	NLIU L. Rev.	National Law Institute University, Bhopal	2010	15	245	S
19	NLUA Law Review	NLUALR	National Law University and Judicial Academy, Assam	2015	4	118	S
20	NLUD Journal of Legal Studies	NLUD J. Leg. Stud.	National Law University, Delhi	2013	9	47	S
21	NLUJ Law Review	NLUJ L. Rev.	National Law University, Jodhpur	2011	17	180	S
22	NMIMS Student Law Review	NMIMS St. L. Rev.	Kirit P. Mehta School of Law, NMIMS, Mumbai	2018	3	49	S
23	NUALS Law Journal	NUALS L.J.	NUALS, Kochi	2005	14	170	S
24	NUJS Law Review	NUJS L. Rev.	WBNUJS, Kolkata	2008	44	424	S
25	RGNUL Student Research Review	RGNUL St. Res. Rev.	RGNUL, Punjab	2014	17	115	S
26	RMLNLU Law Review	RMLNLU L. Rev.	Dr. Ram Manohar Lohiya National Law University, Lucknow	2015	10	132	S
27	Tamil Nadu National Law University Law Review	TNNLU L. Rev.	Tamil Nadu National Law University, Tiruchirapalli	2017	8	25	F
28	The Banaras Law Journal	BLJ	Faculty of Law, Banaras Hindu University	1965	17	199	F
29	UPES Law Review	UPES L. Rev.	School of Law, University of Petroleum and Energy Studies, Dehradun	2013	3	15	S
					360	3745

Method of Ranking

A common approach to ranking journals globally involves using citation-based metrics from large indexing services like Scopus or Web of Science. These systems calculate metrics such as Impact Factor and CiteScore by aggregating the number of times a journal’s articles are cited within a set timeframe and then normalising that figure against the total number of articles published. For example, the Washington and Lee Law Review Rankings use a combined score of multiple citation metrics to rank US law reviews. However, this global standard is difficult to apply in India because most Indian law reviews are not indexed in these major services and often publish without Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). It is thus difficult to compare the quality of scholarship across journals.

Our ranking framework rests on three measurable pillars—Editorial Practices, Citation & Influence, and Author Credentials. Each pillar generates a normalised sub-score (0–100), and the composite ILJRS score is a simple average of the three. Our focus is objective replicability: every raw metric can be reconstructed from publicly available data or the ILJRS dataset. We present these measures in more detail below.

Editorial Policies and Peer Review Practices

Until 2018, Indian universities were largely on their own when deciding which journals to recognise for faculty promotions and doctoral work; the UGC itself offered no formal yardstick. That gap led to inconsistent—and sometimes lax—validation practices across campuses. To impose a baseline, in 2018 the UGC launched the UGC-CARE list, a centrally curated roster of ‘approved’ journals. To be eligible for inclusion in the UGC-CARE list, journals were evaluated against an eight-point checklist. The checklist asked straightforward questions: Does the journal describe its peer-review process? Are the author guidelines publicly posted? Is it published on schedule?—and any title scoring at least six points earned a place on the list.

After UGC-CARE was discontinued in 2025, the commission issued a fresh circular containing 36 ‘Suggestive Parameters for Peer-Reviewed Journals’, meant to guide universities and researchers in judging publication venues. The new list expands the focus beyond basic editorial hygiene to include transparency about the editorial board, disclosure of plagiarism and AI-detection policies, information on indexing and citation data, and acceptance rates. While many of these items still reward good disclosure rather than intrinsic quality, the checklist signals what the UGC now considers hallmarks of a credible scholarly outlet.

We gathered all publicly available details for the journals in our dataset and evaluated each title against two benchmarks: the 8-point UGC-CARE checklist and the 36-point UGC (2025) rubric. To do this, we translated the UGC‑listed criteria into a checklist and recorded whether each journal publicly satisfied the corresponding standard. Since we do not have access to the internal policies or practices of journals, this exercise gauges transparency in declared processes rather than the substantive quality or rigour of the editorial and review process. Table 2 reports the results. Most journals fall short of even the basic editorial disclosures these checklists demand. Information on indexing, acceptance rates, and citation counts is often missing, and many student-edited reviews provide no details on past issues, editorial boards, or submission procedures. In contrast, titles issued by international presses—such as Indian Law Review and Jindal Global Law Review—score well because their publishers standardise websites as per global norms. Student-run journals, lacking comparable resources and infrastructure, typically fail to meet these best practices.

TABLE 2: TOTAL POINTS AS PER UGC CHECKLIST 

Rank	Abbreviation	UGC CARE	UGC (2015)
1	ILR	9	35
2	JGLR	9	27
3	NLSIR	9	24
4	JILI	5	22
5	NUJS L. Rev.	6	21
6	DLR	4	21
7	NLIU L. Rev.	6	21
8	Christ U. L. J.	9	21
9	NLSJ	6	20
10	NALSAR St. L. Rev.	5	20
11	ALR	5	19
12	UPES L. Rev.	6	19
13	GNLU St. L. Rev.	4	19
14	NLUJ L. Rev.	7	18
15	RGNUL St. Res. Rev.	7	18
16	NUALS L.J.	7	17
17	NULJ	8	17
18	DNLU St. L. J.	8	17
19	Lexigentia	6	17
20	NLUD J. Leg. Stud.	5	16
21	TNNLU L. Rev.	4	16
22	BLJ	7	15
23	NLUALR	6	15
24	RMLNLU L. Rev.	5	15
25	CNLU L.J.	5	15
26	KIIT St. L. Rev.	5	12
27	NALSAR L. Rev.	7	11
28	NMIMS St. L. Rev.	4	10
29	DSLR	2	6

Citation and Influence

Citation-based metrics—Impact Factor, CiteScore, CiteRank, and their cousins—are how most indexes rank journals. These metrics aggregate the number of times a journal’s articles are cited within a set time frame, normalise that figure against the total articles published by the journal, and then sort journals that have had the most average citations in that field. Unfortunately, most Indian law reviews publish without DOIs, are missing from the major indexing services, and do not disclose any citation statistics, leaving us unable to track their influence through citation scores.

Without a readymade citation database to lean on, we had to reconstruct measures of journal influence from the ground up. One way to do this is to measure the quality of a journal through its impact on case law, whether articles in these journals have been relied upon by Indian courts. To do this, we compiled every permutation of each journal’s name—full titles, abbreviations, and common misspellings—and searched them across SCC Online and Manupatra databases of the Supreme Court, high court, and tribunal decisions. We tabulated all instances in which these articles were cited by the courts and then counted the total number of citations for each journal.

As Table 3 shows, the result was sobering: less than 1% (8) of the 3,745 articles in our dataset have ever made it into a judicial opinion. The Journal of the Indian Law Institute (Indian Law Institute) was cited by the courts on 49 occasions, but none of those citations occurred in the past ten years. The Indian Law Review is the most cited journal in the last 10 years, with 6 citations across all courts. In fact, most journals have never been cited by any court in India. It would seem then that Indian judges seldom turn to domestic doctrinal scholarship, and judicial citations alone, while a clean metric, are too thinly spread to base journal rankings on.

TABLE 3: TOTAL NUMBER OF CITATIONS BY INDIAN COURTS

Journal	SC	HC	Tribunal	Total	Total (Since 2014)	Unique (Since 2014)
ALR	0	0	0	0	0	0
Christ U. L. J.	0	0	0	0	0	0
CNLU L.J.	0	0	0	0	0	0
DLR	1	4	0	4	0	0
DSLR	0	0	0	0	0	0
DNLU St. L. J.	0	0	0	0	0	0
GNLU St. L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
ILR	6	3	0	3	6	3
JGLR	1	1	0	1	0	0
JILI	16	47	2	49	0	0
KIIT St. L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
Lexigentia	0	0	0	0	0	0
NALSAR L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
NALSAR St. L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
NLSJ	2	2	0	2	0	0
NLSIR	4	2	1	3	3	2
NULJ	0	0	0	0	0	0
NLIU L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
NLUALR	0	0	0	0	0	0
NLUD J. Leg. Stud.	0	0	0	0	0	0
NLUJ L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
NMIMS St. L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
NUALS L.J.	0	0	0	0	0	0
NUJS L. Rev.	3	5	1	6	3	3
RGNUL St. Res. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
RMLNLU L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
TNNLU L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
BLJ	0	0	0	0	0	0
UPES L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
	33	64	4	68	12	8

A second method was to map the conversation among scholars themselves. For each article, we harvested the reference list, normalised each citation, and built a network showing ‘who cites whom’ within our corpus. We then calculated the mean in-degree for each journal—the average number of times its articles are cited by other articles in our dataset. Table 4 shows the results. The picture that emerges is, again, surprisingly sparse: an average of just 0.9 in-citations per article. Newer or student-edited journals rarely cite one another, preferring instead to draw on foreign periodicals and primary Indian sources such as Supreme Court cases and statutes. Indian legal scholarship, it seems, still looks outward more than it converses with itself.

Since both of these methods yielded sparse measures, we used a third, broader measure: raw citation counts on Google Scholar. This is the only platform that casts a sufficiently wide net to pick up Indian law reviews, albeit with important caveats—it indexes citations by preprints and unpublished manuscripts, and it misses many print-only articles. To keep the exercise manageable and statistically fair, we drew random samples of 10, 20, or 50 Scholar-indexed articles from each journal and averaged the citation tallies across articles. We then chose the highest average across the 3 samples as that journal’s out-cite score.

These citation counts are best read as rough estimates. Google Scholar can double-count citations, include references found in preprints, and is vulnerable to deliberate inflation, so the figures almost certainly exaggerate ‘authoritative’ impact. Even so, they offer a useful yardstick for comparing journals against one another. The core pattern is unmistakable: most Indian law review articles attract very little scholarly attention online. Across our entire sample, the mean is just 3.63 citations per article, with large dispersion. Indian Law Review tops the table at 31.9 citations on average, with JGLR trailing behind. At the other end of the spectrum, several student-edited journals have not garnered a single citation in Google Scholar.

Taken together, these three vantage points sketch a consistent narrative. A small cohort of journals enjoys recognisable but modest influence. Below that tier, the attention curve falls off quickly; most newer reviews seem to serve primarily as forums for early-career writing rather than as engines of doctrinal development. In any event, the infrastructure for tracking and amplifying Indian legal research remains patchy. Until more journals adopt rigorous peer review, migrate back issues online, and enter international indexing services, the conversation will continue to be dominated by a few flagships, while the bulk of domestic scholarship remains isolated.

TABLE 4: NETWORK CITATIONS AND AVERAGE GOOGLE SCHOLAR CITATIONS

Rank	Abbreviation	In-cite	In-cite (self)	Google Scholar-10	Google Scholar-20	Google Scholar-50	Google Scholar (high)
1	ILR	31	21	21.9	31.9	31.26	31.9
2	JGLR	10	0	3.9	16.25	13.7	16.25
3	NUJS L. Rev.	127	45	9.1	15.9	14.9	15.9
4	JILI	118	0	14.5	11.75	10.6	14.5
5	NLSJ	4	0	13.3	7.5	3.38	13.3
6	NLSIR	39	13	3.1	6.15	4.32	6.15
7	NALSAR L. Rev.	10	0	5.1	2.75	1.32	5.1
8	NUALS L.J.	1	0	3.1	2.45	1.5	3.1
9	DLR	7	2	1.4	3.05	1.76	3.05
10	NLUJ L. Rev.	6	1	1.7	0.85	0.34	1.7
11	ALR	1	0	1.5	0.75	0.3	1.5
12	BLJ	4	3	1.5	1.1	0.44	1.5
13	NLUALR	0	0	1.4	0.7	0.28	1.4
14	NLIU L. Rev.	0	0	0.4	1.3	0.54	1.3
15	NULJ	4	0	0.9	0.45	0.18	0.9
16	NLUD J. Leg. Stud.	3	0	0.8	0.85	0.54	0.85
17	RMLNLU L. Rev.	6	1	0.8	0.4	0.16	0.8
18	RGNUL St. Res. Rev.	5	0	0.7	0.45	0.18	0.7
19	Christ U. L. J.	4	0	0.4	0.2	0.08	0.4
20	NALSAR St. L. Rev.	6	0	0.4	0.2	0.08	0.4
21	UPES L. Rev.	1	0	0.3	0.15	0.06	0.3
22	CNLU L.J.	0	0	0.2	0.1	0.04	0.2
23	DNLU St. L. J.	0	0	0.1	0.05	0.02	0.1
24	TNNLU L. Rev.	0	0	0.1	0.05	0.02	0.1
25	DSLR	0	0	0	0	0	0
26	GNLU St. L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
27	KIIT St. L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
28	Lexigentia	1	0	0	0	0	0
29	NMIMS St. L. Rev.	0	0	0	0	0	0
		388	86	2.986	3.631	2.966	3.631

Author Credentials

One way to gauge a journal’s quality is to look at who publishes in it. Seasoned scholars and senior practitioners tend to submit their work to outlets they believe are rigorous and well-regarded. Jarvis and Coleman (1997) used this approach when ranking US law reviews, scoring journals according to the credentials of their contributors. Publications that featured Supreme Court justices and senior academics outranked those that primarily printed articles by law-firm associates or students, since the former had more ‘drawing power’.

We refined that model to fit the Indian context. Under our rubric, adapted from Jarvis and Coleman (1997), a piece authored by a judge earns 5 points, a faculty-authored piece earns 4, a researcher earns 3, a postgraduate student earns 2, and an undergraduate student-authored piece earns 1 point. For multi-author papers, we took the average of each contributor’s score. We also awarded an extra point for authors based outside India, on the theory that choosing an Indian journal over one in their home country signals international recognition of the publication. We recognise that these credential scores are an imperfect proxy for prestige and do not account for potential issues such as judicial ghostwriting or the fact that academic networks may determine who writes for a journal. The point at this stage is not to build a normative framework of author prestige, but to provide a replicable and adjustable weighting criterion for authorship. Readers may choose their own weights for authors and adapt these rankings accordingly.

The scores obtained from these are given in Table 5. The table paints a sharply tiered picture of Indian law journals. The top‐five titles—Indian Law Review, Jindal Global Law Review, Tamil Nadu National Law University Law Journal, Delhi Law Review, and National Law School Journal—are all faculty-edited and publish articles by academics, professionals, and foreign authors, indicators that seasoned professionals and overseas scholars consider these venues reputable. By contrast, journals in the bottom third—many student-edited reviews housed in newer law schools—draw the bulk of their content from undergraduates (frequently well over 60%).

In general, undergraduate law students and professors dominate the landscape of Indian law journals, which publish very little work from postgraduate (2.4%) or doctoral scholars (3.25%). There is also scant participation from the professional community, be it the bar (11%) or the bench (1%).

TABLE 5: AUTHOR TYPE AND CREDENTIAL SCORE OF JOURNALS

Rank	Journal	Student			Academic		Professional			Foreign (+1)	Credential Score
		UG (+1)	PG (+2)	PhD (+3)	Researcher (+3)	Professor (+4)	Litigator (+4)	Law Firm (+4)	Judge (+5)
1	ILR	0.00%	1.31%	3.92%	6.54%	73.86%	11.11%	3.27%	0.00%	41.83%	4.31
2	JGLR	1.35%	0.00%	3.59%	4.93%	77.13%	7.17%	4.48%	1.35%	42.60%	4.19
3	TNNLU L. Rev.	8.33%	0.00%	0.00%	8.33%	75.00%	8.33%	0.00%	0.00%	41.67%	4.08
4	DLR	2.17%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	93.48%	4.35%	0.00%	0.00%	6.52%	4.04
5	NLSJ	5.26%	0.00%	26.32%	0.00%	57.89%	5.26%	0.00%	5.26%	31.58%	3.97
6	NALSAR L. Rev.	0.00%	2.50%	10.00%	2.50%	75.00%	5.00%	0.00%	5.00%	12.50%	3.96
7	ALR	0.00%	0.85%	5.93%	5.08%	79.66%	5.93%	1.69%	0.85%	11.02%	3.96
8	JILI	0.00%	0.37%	4.10%	6.34%	75.75%	8.58%	0.75%	4.10%	12.31%	3.93
9	NLSIR	7.22%	3.09%	2.06%	10.31%	44.33%	23.71%	7.22%	2.06%	21.65%	3.88
10	BLJ	0.52%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	97.40%	1.04%	0.52%	0.52%	11.46%	3.48
11	NLUD J. Leg. Stud.	23.40%	0.00%	12.77%	10.64%	12.77%	29.79%	10.64%	0.00%	14.89%	3.15
12	Lexigentia	0.00%	3.33%	20.00%	3.33%	46.67%	20.00%	0.00%	6.67%	6.67%	2.77
13	NUJS L. Rev.	45.32%	2.96%	4.93%	9.36%	20.20%	13.79%	3.45%	0.00%	6.65%	2.5
14	NULJ	44.79%	5.21%	5.21%	1.04%	35.42%	6.25%	0.00%	2.08%	4.17%	2.48
15	NLUALR	42.34%	6.31%	4.50%	6.31%	33.33%	6.31%	0.90%	0.00%	1.80%	2.46
16	CNLU L.J.	48.89%	1.11%	1.11%	3.33%	40.00%	1.11%	2.22%	2.22%	1.11%	2.46
17	NLUJ L. Rev.	45.45%	7.79%	3.90%	1.30%	20.78%	7.79%	11.69%	1.30%	4.55%	2.44
18	RGNUL St. Res. Rev.	50.91%	6.36%	0.91%	12.73%	11.82%	5.45%	11.82%	0.00%	9.09%	2.23
19	NUALS L.J.	60.26%	5.13%	5.13%	6.41%	14.10%	7.69%	1.28%	0.00%	3.21%	2.02
20	NALSAR St. L. Rev.	68.29%	2.44%	0.00%	4.88%	12.20%	4.88%	7.32%	0.00%	3.66%	1.96
21	KIIT St. L. Rev.	70.15%	1.49%	0.00%	0.00%	16.42%	2.99%	8.96%	0.00%	7.46%	1.86
22	GNLU St. L. Rev.	66.67%	11.11%	4.44%	0.00%	8.89%	8.89%	0.00%	0.00%	6.67%	1.74
23	Christ U. L. J.	75.57%	0.76%	0.76%	3.05%	13.74%	3.82%	1.53%	0.76%	8.40%	1.74
24	NMIMS St. L. Rev.	70.27%	5.41%	0.00%	2.70%	18.92%	0.00%	2.70%	0.00%	2.70%	1.73
25	DNLU St. L. J.	68.97%	6.90%	3.45%	3.45%	6.90%	10.34%	0.00%	0.00%	6.90%	1.62
26	RMLNLU L. Rev.	79.31%	1.72%	0.00%	1.72%	10.34%	0.00%	6.90%	0.00%	1.72%	1.57
27	DSLR	80.70%	3.51%	1.75%	5.26%	1.75%	7.02%	0.00%	0.00%	1.75%	1.42
28	NLIU L. Rev.	89.87%	0.00%	0.84%	0.84%	3.80%	2.53%	2.11%	0.00%	0.42%	1.29
29	UPES L. Rev.	91.67%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	0.00%	8.33%	0.00%	0.00%	1.1
		36.76%	2.40%	3.25%	4.89%	40.33%	8.06%	3.31%	1.00%	11.31%

Other Rankings Systems

Apart from the ones mentioned above, some other methods can, in principle, be used to rank Indian journals. For example, alternative metric services such as Altmetric Explorer and PlumX trace the online footprint of each article—mentions in news outlets, blogs, policy documents, tweets, even Wikipedia—then summarise that activity into a single ‘attention score’. However, these tools can track only articles equipped with DOIs and metadata, features missing from nearly all of the 3,745 articles in our dataset, so most Indian reviews would incorrectly appear to have no social-media reach at all. Second, instead of citation counts, one can examine the view counts of a journal’s articles, giving us some indication of how many people read the articles in the journal. SCC Online Blog once used to publish its league tables based on view and download counts for every journal in its catalogue. A third option is a perception survey. Researchers can ask academics, judges, and practitioners to grade journals on prestige, editorial rigour, and usefulness. Such surveys could capture public perception of the quality of these journals. However, they demand nationwide sampling, careful design, as well as significant time and resources. None of those ranking methods were available to us for the journals in the dataset.

Final Rankings

To make our final rankings, we combine all 3 ranking systems—UGC Checklist (2025): Criteria; Google Scholar (high) citation score: Influence; and Author Prestige Scores: Credentials—by normalising them to a 0–100 scale (the top-performing journal in each category is assigned a score of 100 to serve as a benchmark) and then taking the average to get the overall score. Table 6 gives the final rankings.

TABLE 6: FINAL RANKING OF INDIAN LAW JOURNALS AS PER ILJRS

Rank	Journal	Influence	Credentials	Criteria	Overall
1	Indian Law Review	100	100	100	100
2	Jindal Global Law Review	51	96	72	73
3	Journal of the Indian Law Institute	45	88	55	63
4	National Law School Journal	42	89	48	60
5	National Law School of India Review	19	87	62	56
6	Delhi Law Review	10	92	52	51
7	NUJS Law Review	50	44	52	49
8	Amity Law Review	5	89	45	46
9	Tamil Nadu National Law University Law Review	0	93	34	42
10	NALSAR Law Review	16	89	17	41
11	The Banaras Law Journal	5	74	31	37
12	NLUD Journal of Legal Studies	3	64	34	34
13	Lexigentia-International Law Journal of Lloyd Law College	0	52	38	30
14	NLUJ Law Review	5	42	41	29
15	Nirma University Law Journal	3	43	38	28
16	RGNUL Student Research Review	2	35	41	26
17	NUALS Law Journal	10	29	38	26
18	NLUA Law Review	4	42	31	26
19	NALSAR Student Law Review	1	27	48	25
20	CNLU Law Journal	1	42	31	25
21	Christ University Law Journal	1	20	52	24
22	GNLU Student Law Review	0	20	45	22
23	NLIU Law Review	4	6	52	21
24	DNLU Student Law Journal	0	16	38	18
25	RMLNLU Law Review	3	15	31	16
26	UPES Law Review	1	0	45	15
27	KIIT Student Law Review	0	24	21	15
28	NMIMS Student Law Review	0	20	14	11
29	Delhi Law Review (Student Edition)	0	10	0	3

Conclusion

The Indian Law Journals Ranking System introduced here offers a transparent, data-driven approach to evaluating Indian law journals. What is important is not the specific numerical rankings assigned, but the establishment of an open and replicable system of assessment. While individual academics or institutions might reasonably disagree with certain methodological choices, such as the precise points allocated for author credentials or the weighting of UGC’s suggested parameters, the ILJRS now furnishes the academic community with both the raw data and a clear methodology for conducting their own analyses. This empowers users to adjust variables, test different assumptions, and form their own informed judgements about journal quality.

This initial iteration of the ILJRS represents the first phase in a necessarily continuous and evolving endeavour. Our current focus has been on indexing and ranking prominent generalist law journals primarily associated with law schools, which means that several well-established and historically significant publications, such as the journal sections of Supreme Court Cases (SCC) and All India Reporter (AIR), have not yet been included. We have also not included specialist journals like Socio-Legal Review or Indian Journal of Arbitration Law. We intend to continue to expand the ILJRS, incorporating a wider array of journals to provide a more comprehensive map of the Indian legal research landscape. To this end, we actively encourage editorial teams to submit their journals for inclusion in future ranking exercises and welcome volunteers who wish to contribute to this ongoing effort to enhance the transparency and understanding of scholarly legal publishing in India. The dynamic and current ranking tables can be found on this website.

The rankings themselves, while a useful metric, are secondary to our larger ambition: to contribute to a broader project of mapping and understanding. The process of constructing these rankings has already unearthed several critical insights into the current ecosystem. Notably, our analysis reveals a discernible trend, in which Indian law journals exhibit limited engagement with domestic scholarly literature, often preferring to cite foreign sources. The data indicates a significant disconnect between academic publishing and judicial practice, with Indian courts seldom citing articles from these journals. Perhaps, most strikingly, the authorship landscape is heavily dominated by undergraduate students, with very little contribution from legal practitioners, members of the judiciary, and independent researchers. We will continue to analyse and write on these with an aim to improve the quality, reach, and impact of legal research across India.

 

About the Authors 

Dr Rahul Hemrajani is an assistant professor of law at NLSIU.

Riddhi Alok Puranik is a second year LLB (Hons) student at NLSIU.

Shristy Chhaparia is a final year BA LLB (Hons) student at NLSIU.

Tvisha Vasudevan is a fourth year BA LLB (Hons) student at NLSIU.