Can any NLU grads provide tips on how to get published in SCOPUS indexed journals? Would be of immense help, considering many have become accomplished academics in their field and publishing profusely
Don't be obsessed with SCOPUS. SCOPUS has plenty of terrible journals too while many great journals are not in SCOPUS simply because Elsevier doesn't want to promote competition. Find a good journal (ask academics) don't go by a list. If you really need to do it check its Citescore. Read some papers to get an idea of what kind of material is making the cut and then proceed to write on what you intend to. Once you have written the article get a peer review done first from your college friends and then your professors, make changes and then submit it. If your article doesn't make the cut, don't be disappointed, ask for comments from the editorial board (if they haven't provided already) work on them, make changes and submit it somewhere else.
Of course, if your idea is just to hack through the game, you can find plenty of not so great journals and periodicals indexed by Scopus where the threshold is much lower and you can easily get published there.
So, how would you defend the decision of SCOPUS to index the Journal of Intellectual Property Rights (NISCAIR) but not the Indian Journal of Law & Technology? Indian Law Review is another top-notch journal that is not included but EPW is. While EPW is a good periodical but the level of discourse is nowhere close to that required in a law review. Try reading few articles in NTUT Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Management, another SCOPUS indexed journal, and you will understand the point I am trying to convey here. SCOPUS is not the gold standard, not even by a long email but if that is what makes you happy, good for you. My father is a physicist with multiple patents to his name and my mother is a social scientist working at one of the academic institutions in India. I also have few publications to my name including one in a Scopus indexed journal.
Please ignore the comment by the Jindal alumnus (who doesn't even know the spelling of "alumnus") dissing SCOPUS. The vast majority of journals there are very good. You have to go to the SCOPUS website and look at the list of journals and choose the journal with high impact factor. Those journals will without exception be top class. https://www.scopus.com/sources
The Indian journals currently listed include Jindal, EPW, JIPR and Contributions to Indian Sociology. Some NLU law journals have applied to be included like Jindal, so the list may expand in the next few years. There is an open process through which any law school can apply.
He said the same thing that you did, so why are you disparaging him? He asked to go by the cite score, which is the actual jargon used, and you spoke about impact factor, which is not the term used by SCOPUS. It seems he knows the site better than you do. Even otherwise, it is perfectly accurate that SCOPUS ends up listing several predatory journals, which is why it has to carry on a continuous screening and comes up with discontinued title lists several times a year. You seem to have got very little idea about how things actually work with SCOPUS. And no, not every law school can apply for their journals to be indexed in SCOPUS, since the latter does not list student-run journals, no matter how good. Most of the NLU journals are like that. There are many reputed peer-reviewed international journals that are not SCOPUS-indexed for this very reason.
I myself have downvoted obvious trolling by people purportedly from Jindal in other threads. However, when someone speaks sense and obviously knows what they are saying, then not recognising it as sense would only reveal my own ignorance, nothing else.
How do journals published by Springer, SAGE, Taylor & Francis compare (the ones which are SCOPUS indexed as well)? In addition, how much do publications of this nature matter for LLM applications (assuming they're on a relatively similar theme, and in harmony with the SoP)?
Most of the publishers you named are decent ones. If you can get good publications in reputed journals run by those, then it is definitely a plus point in your CV. I didn't like to moot during law school, but was fortunate enough to get 4 of such publications. I'm fairly certain that it helped me secure a full scholarship for my LLM later (Stanford).
Thanks for that! Since it's been pointed out above that SCOPUS indexing doesn't carry much weight in these US law schools, is it worth mentioning the SCOPUS indexing in an SoP / CV or would the name of the journal and publisher suffice?
Speaking as someone with more than one such publication, one general tip is to focus on quantitative analysis of data, maybe collaborate with people from stats/econometrics background with knowledge to use software like IBM SPSS etc. It would set apart your paper from that of others. There's a dearth of good quantitative legal research in this country. Do not simply go by the SCOPUS tag, there are plenty of bad and predatory journals around with such a tag (though SCOPUS tries to weed those out based on complaints, it is a never-ending battle). Focus on the ones associated with respectable publishers and universities, as well as those with high SCOPUS cite-scores (5 and above are generally safe). As a thumb rule, the ones seeking payment of any kind (unless they are open-source) can be quite shady, so try to avoid those. SCOPUS obsession is a relatively recent fad in Indian academia, academics from UK or USA don't really care about it, instead preferring to focus on the reputation of the journal. If you can get published in a journal associated with Oxbridge, Harvard, Stanford, Columbia etc., nobody would care whether it's SCOPUS indexed or not.
Of course, if your idea is just to hack through the game, you can find plenty of not so great journals and periodicals indexed by Scopus where the threshold is much lower and you can easily get published there.
Best of luck!
Indian Law Review is another top-notch journal that is not included but EPW is. While EPW is a good periodical but the level of discourse is nowhere close to that required in a law review.
Try reading few articles in NTUT Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Management, another SCOPUS indexed journal, and you will understand the point I am trying to convey here. SCOPUS is not the gold standard, not even by a long email but if that is what makes you happy, good for you.
My father is a physicist with multiple patents to his name and my mother is a social scientist working at one of the academic institutions in India. I also have few publications to my name including one in a Scopus indexed journal.
https://www.scopus.com/sources
The Indian journals currently listed include Jindal, EPW, JIPR and Contributions to Indian Sociology. Some NLU law journals have applied to be included like Jindal, so the list may expand in the next few years. There is an open process through which any law school can apply.