GENERAL ARTICLES CURRENT SCIENCE, VOL. 106, NO. 5, 10 MARCH 2014 681 Marcin Kozak is in the Department of Quantitative Methods in Economics, University of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow, Sucharskiego 2, 35- 225 Rzeszów, Poland; Olesia Iefremova and Mateusz Stopa are in the Department of Social Sciences, Univer- sity of Information Technology and Management in Rzeszow, Suchar- skiego 2, 35-225 Rzeszów, Poland; James Hartley is in the School of Psychology, Keele University, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, United Kingdom. *For correspondence. (e-mail: nyggus@gmail.com) Indian economics and Indian scholarly publishing: is there room for Current Science? Marcin Kozak*, Olesia Iefremova, Mateusz Stopa and James Hartley Multidisciplinary science journals include a few papers in economics. However, very few papers in economics appear in Current Science, itself a multidisciplinary journal. This article reports the results obtained from our analysis of the possible reasons for this situation. A study of almost 6500 articles from the journal’s archives led us to the conclusion that the proportion of the journal’s papers in the field of economics is very small, less than 0.5%. Thus we conducted an e-mail survey with 43 Indian authors publishing in Indian economics journals, asking them whether or not they had submitted any manuscript to Current Science and what were the reasons for this decision. Then, following a quantitative analysis, we constructed a model that represented the different argumentation strategies used by our sample of authors. Our main conclusion is that it is a lack of communication between economics researchers and the journal itself that creates disciplinary gaps in the multidisciplinary nature of Current Science. Keywords: Dissemination of scientific results, international acknowledgement, multidisciplinary journals, MULTIDISCIPLINARY journals serve the following positive functions in scholarly publishing 1 : stimulating new ideas, disseminating information to a broader audience, provid- ing an outlet for unusual papers, and providing cohesion within disciplines. Multidisciplinary journals are thus important in the dis- semination of scientific results, a fact confirmed by the journals like Science and Nature. Single-discipline jour- nals obviously serve a different role by disseminating scientific results among researchers and practitioners in a particular discipline. This is perhaps the reason why so many authors think that publishing in a single-discipline journal is a more efficient way of disseminating scientific results. We do not wish to enter any discussion here on how one should understand ‘national’ versus ‘international’ interdisciplinary journals 2 . What is important for the pre- sent article is that we treat Current Science, an Indian journal, as an international journal that is recognizable worldwide. Suffice it to look at numbers: in 2000–2005, 4622 articles (of any type) were published by the journal, of which 3885 (84%) were affiliated to an Indian institu- tion (including co-authorships with foreign partners) . These 4622 articles had 22,508 citations in the Web of Science, of which 11,638 (52%) were in papers not affili- ated with any Indian institution. Thus, while most of the journal authors are from India, slightly more than half of those who cite Current Science are from abroad. In India, research papers in SCI journals have been established as one of the criteria for obtaining grants by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Delhi 3 . Personally, we do not think that impact factors (IFs) are the sine qua non of the quality of journals and that journals with IFs are the only ones worth publishing in. However, even opponents of IFs will agree that science journals indexed in the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) are the main players in today’s scientific discourse 4 . Indeed, there are numerous journals indexed in JCR Social Sciences ( JCRSS) Edition in the category econom- ics: 209 in the 2008 JCRSS Edition (10.5% of all journals in the JCRSS Edition), 247 in 2009 (10.9%), 305 in 2010 (11.1%), 321 in 2011 (10.8%) and 333 in 2012 JCRSS Edition (10.9%). These data show that over 10% of the journals listed in the JCRSS Edition are in the field of economics – suggesting that this is an important category of the edi- tion. Against this background, with Indian journals (with one exception) excluded from the JCRSS Edition , the publishing realm of Indian economics seems to have only a national and regional character. This, in turn, suggests that Indian research in economics has a smaller chance of being internationally acknowledged, unless Indian researchers in economics prefer to publish in international journals.