Garuda — short for Garba Rujukan Digital (“digital reference gateway”) — is Indonesia’s national index of journal articles and conference proceedings. It is the country’s equivalent of a national bibliographic database: rather than hosting full text itself, it harvests and aggregates metadata (and, where publishers allow, links to full text) from thousands of Indonesian journals and conference series, most of which run on Open Journal Systems (OJS) or similar platforms hosted by universities, research institutes, and professional associations.
Garuda is not a peer-reviewed or curated “top journals” list. Being indexed in Garuda mainly means a journal’s metadata has been successfully harvested into the system — it is a discovery and reference layer, not a quality signal on its own. Quality and accreditation in the Indonesian system are handled separately, primarily through Arjuna (the national journal accreditation submission process) and reported through SINTA, as explained below.
Who runs Garuda
Garuda is operated by the Indonesian government’s higher-education and research ministry. Ministry names and structures in Indonesia have changed more than once in the last decade, and this matters for anyone trying to find the “official” current source:
- Following a cabinet reorganisation in October 2024, Indonesia’s former Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology (Kemdikbudristek) was split into separate ministries, including the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology — Kementerian Pendidikan Tinggi, Sains, dan Teknologi, abbreviated Kemdiktisaintek.
- Higher-education and research-adjacent portals, including Garuda, SINTA, and Arjuna, now sit under Kemdiktisaintek’s domain (
kemdiktisaintek.go.id), rather than the olderkemdikbud.go.iddomain many older links and guides still reference.
If you land on an older page or bookmark pointing at garuda.kemdikbud.go.id, expect it to now resolve under the Kemdiktisaintek domain. This kind of domain and ministry-name churn is common across Indonesian government research infrastructure and is worth checking for before citing a URL in an institutional policy document or bibliography.
What Garuda indexes
Garuda’s catalogue is built primarily from:
- Indonesian academic journals — the large majority of entries, spanning every discipline, from journals published by universities, faculties, professional associations, and research institutes.
- Conference proceedings — papers presented at Indonesian academic and professional conferences that publish proceedings through a harvestable platform.
Coverage depends entirely on whether a publisher’s system exposes harvestable metadata (typically via OAI-PMH from an OJS installation) and whether that journal has been registered and accepted into Garuda. A journal not appearing in Garuda does not necessarily mean it doesn’t exist or isn’t legitimate — it may simply not yet be indexed, or its metadata feed may be broken or incomplete. Conversely, appearing in Garuda is a low bar compared with appearing in SINTA with a journal accreditation rank, or being indexed in Scopus or Web of Science.
Garuda vs. SINTA vs. Arjuna: how the three systems relate
These three names are frequently confused because they are tightly linked in practice, but each does a different job:
- Garuda is the indexing/discovery layer: it collects article- and proceedings-level metadata so the output of Indonesian research is searchable in one place.
- Arjuna is the accreditation process: the system Indonesian journals use to submit themselves for national accreditation review against government-set quality criteria.
- SINTA (Science and Technology Index) is the reporting and ranking layer: it displays the resulting accreditation ranks (S1 through S6) for journals, and aggregates researcher- and institution-level performance metrics, drawing on Garuda, Scopus, and Google Scholar data. CASRAI covers SINTA in detail in a separate guide: SINTA (Science and Technology Index): Indonesia’s National Researcher, Journal, and Institution Ranking System.
In practice, a journal’s path usually runs: get indexed in Garuda (metadata is harvestable and discoverable) → submit for accreditation through Arjuna → if successful, the resulting S1–S6 rank is published and tracked through SINTA. A journal can be indexed in Garuda without ever holding a SINTA accreditation rank, and Garuda-indexed article counts are one of several inputs Arjuna reviewers and SINTA’s scoring consider — alongside citation counts, editorial governance, and publishing consistency — but Garuda indexing by itself is not an accreditation outcome.
How a journal gets into Garuda
Indexing is initiated at the publisher/journal level, not by individual authors:
- The journal’s editorial team or publisher operates (or migrates to) a platform that can expose standard, harvestable metadata — almost always an OJS installation configured with complete, consistent article metadata (title, abstract, authors, affiliations, DOI where available, publication date).
- The journal registers with Garuda, typically through the “Publisher” registration pathway on the Garuda site, providing the journal’s identifying details (ISSN, publisher, subject area, and the harvestable metadata endpoint).
- Garuda periodically harvests the journal’s metadata; once accepted, new articles are added to the index as new issues are published and harvested.
Because harvesting depends on the publisher’s own platform staying online and correctly configured, gaps or interruptions in a journal’s Garuda listing are usually a sign of a metadata feed problem on the publisher’s end rather than a deliberate delisting — this is one of the most common sources of confusion for editorial teams who expect newly published issues to appear immediately.
What this means for researchers
Garuda does not issue an author identifier comparable to ORCID or a Scopus Author ID, and it is not where an individual researcher manages a personal profile. Researcher-level identity and output tracking in the Indonesian system runs through SINTA, which links a researcher’s SINTA ID to their Google Scholar and Scopus profiles and aggregates the journal articles Garuda has indexed under their name. If you are trying to check or correct how your publications appear in the Indonesian national system, the SINTA researcher profile — not Garuda directly — is normally the place to start; see CASRAI’s SINTA guide linked above for that process, and CASRAI’s guide on creating a Scopus Author ID if your SINTA profile needs a Scopus identifier to link against.
For researchers publishing with Indonesian journals, the practical implications are: (1) an article showing up in Garuda is a metadata/discoverability outcome, not a peer-review or quality endorsement; (2) if an article is missing from Garuda weeks after publication, the most likely cause is a metadata-harvesting gap at the journal’s platform, which the researcher can raise with the journal’s editorial office; and (3) Garuda listing alone does not establish a journal’s accreditation rank — that information should be checked directly in SINTA under the journal’s Arjuna-assigned S1–S6 rank, not assumed from Garuda inclusion.
What this means for institutional and library administrators
For a university library, research office, or journal-management unit, Garuda is primarily relevant in two ways:
- As a discovery source — for compiling a comprehensive picture of an institution’s or department’s Indonesian-language and nationally published research output, since much of this output will never appear in Scopus, Web of Science, or other international indexes.
- As an upstream dependency for accreditation reporting — institutions that publish their own journals need to ensure those journals’ OJS (or equivalent) metadata feeds remain correctly configured and harvestable, since a broken feed can quietly stall a journal’s Garuda presence and, downstream, complicate its Arjuna accreditation review and SINTA reporting.
Administrators supporting Indonesian research offices may also find CASRAI’s overview of BRIN and Indonesia’s national research funding and governance structure useful background, since Garuda, Arjuna, and SINTA sit within the same broader national research-infrastructure landscape that BRIN and Kemdiktisaintek jointly shape.
Frequently asked questions
Is Garuda the same as SINTA?
No. Garuda is the article/proceedings metadata index; SINTA is the researcher-, journal-, and institution-level ranking and reporting system that draws on Garuda (along with Scopus and Google Scholar) as one of its data sources. A journal or article can appear in Garuda without the journal holding a SINTA accreditation rank.
Which ministry currently runs Garuda?
Garuda is operated under Indonesia’s Ministry of Higher Education, Science, and Technology (Kemdiktisaintek), formed in October 2024 when the previous Ministry of Education, Culture, Research, and Technology (Kemdikbudristek) was split into separate ministries. Older references to a “Kemdikbud” or “Kemdikbudristek”-run Garuda reflect the pre-2024 structure.
Does Garuda index theses, dissertations, or books?
Garuda’s core catalogue is built from journal articles and conference proceedings. If you are looking for an Indonesian thesis or dissertation, check with the awarding institution’s own repository rather than assuming Garuda coverage.
How do I register a journal in Garuda?
Registration is done by the journal’s publisher or editorial team through Garuda’s publisher-registration pathway, which requires the journal to operate a platform (typically OJS) that exposes complete, harvestable article metadata. Individual authors cannot register a journal on a publisher’s behalf.
Why is my published article missing from Garuda?
This is almost always a metadata-harvesting issue on the journal’s own platform rather than a deliberate exclusion. Contact the journal’s editorial or technical office to confirm its OJS metadata feed is current and correctly configured.
