Why an Obscure Indian Journal Has an Impressive — and Growing — International Stature

Earlier this year a Canadian medical ethicist published a doozy of an essay1 claiming that the heavyweight New England Journal of Medicine was poorly vetting its authors and publishing shoddy studies. The piece drew lots of attention for those allegations. But what went unremarked, though perhaps just as notable, is the place where they appeared: The Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME).

The IJME isn’t on anyone’s list of most desirable places to publish. It’s not even indexed by Thomson Reuters’ Web of Science, which means it doesn’t have an official Impact Factor2, used to rank journals. But for a relatively unknown and ostensibly local title — we hadn’t heard of it until a few months ago, and we have heard of an awful lot of journals — it has an impressive list of staff and contributors, and has been earning plaudits from the science community lately. Where did this mysterious journal come from?

Though the journal’s prominence is new, the forerunner to the IJME was actually founded more than two dozen years ago. In the late 1980s, Amar Jesani, the journal’s current editor, and others joined the so-called Forum for Medical Ethics, an activist group pushing to reform the regulatory Maharashtra Medical Council. The Forum published the first issue of the journal — then called Medical Ethics — in August 1993...