The UGC-CARE list (Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics) was, from 2019 to early 2025, the Indian University Grants Commission’s official mechanism for identifying “quality” academic journals for use in faculty recruitment, promotion, and research assessment. As of a UGC notification dated 11 February 2025, following a Commission decision at its 584th meeting on 3 October 2024, UGC discontinued the CARE list as an actively maintained approval mechanism. There is no current, live UGC-CARE list that adds or removes journals going forward — what remains is a static reference/archival list (UGC has said it uploaded roughly 1,474 previously-listed journals, as of 10 February 2025, for historical reference only, explicitly stating that appearing on it does not imply current validation). This is a fast-moving, frequently misreported area — a large share of blog content still describes CARE as an active, ongoing list. This page reflects UGC’s own 2024-2025 discontinuation decision as reported consistently across independent Indian higher-education press coverage; readers making a compliance-critical decision (a specific promotion case, a specific journal dispute) should confirm the current position directly with their institution and, where possible, UGC’s own published notifications, since a body that discontinued one national mechanism can in principle revise or replace it again.
What UGC-CARE Was Set Up To Do
CARE replaced an earlier, simpler UGC-Approved List of Journals that UGC itself had introduced a few years before. That earlier list ran into a well-documented credibility problem: an expert review found that a very large share of the journals on it were predatory or of dubious editorial quality — exactly the kind of predatory journal problem CASRAI’s own Dictionary and guide content cover more generally (see how to identify predatory journals and publishers). UGC scrapped that list and, through its Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics, launched CARE as a more rigorously vetted replacement, intended to give Indian higher educational institutions (HEIs) and individual researchers a single, UGC-endorsed reference point for whether a journal counted as legitimate for academic purposes.
CARE sat alongside, but was legally distinct from, UGC’s other major research-integrity instrument for Indian HEIs: the 2018 Promotion of Academic Integrity and Prevention of Plagiarism Regulations. The plagiarism regulations govern how similarity is measured and penalized in a specific thesis or manuscript; CARE governed which journals counted as acceptable publication venues in the first place. A paper published in a non-CARE journal wasn’t necessarily plagiarized — CARE and the plagiarism regulations addressed two different quality dimensions of the same national research-integrity push.
The Group I vs Group II Structure
UGC-CARE organized journals into two groups with different evidentiary bases:
- Group I — journals reviewed and vetted directly through UGC-CARE’s own methodology: subject-expert panels assessed a journal’s editorial board, peer-review process, publication ethics policies, and general standards before granting inclusion. This was the group CARE’s own apparatus actively curated.
- Group II — journals already indexed in established, internationally recognized bibliographic databases (most notably Web of Science and Scopus) were included on the strength of that existing indexing, without a separate CARE-specific review. The logic was that a journal already vetted by a major international index didn’t need CARE to independently re-verify it.
In practice, Group II functioned as a faster, lower-friction inclusion path piggybacking on external indexing decisions, while Group I represented CARE’s own, India-specific editorial judgment — which is also where most of the later criticism concentrated, since subject-expert panel review is inherently more subjective than confirming an external index entry.
How a Journal Got Onto (or Off) the List
Getting a journal added to CARE (Group I) generally required a nomination — either by the journal itself or by a subject expert/HEI — through the UGC-CARE portal, followed by review against published criteria covering editorial board composition, peer-review rigor, publication ethics and transparency policies, regularity of publication, and absence of red flags associated with predatory practices (fake impact metrics, pay-to-publish practices with no real review, editorial board members who couldn’t be verified). A subject-specific expert committee assessed submissions before a journal was added.
Removal was also a real, recurring feature of how the list operated, and it became one of the sources of criticism that eventually contributed to its discontinuation: journals could be, and were, delisted after inclusion — sometimes years after a researcher had already published in them and relied on that inclusion for a completed promotion case. Frequent additions and removals, combined with reports of “cloned” or duplicated versions of legitimately CARE-listed print journals being used to deceive authors into believing they were submitting to the real, vetted publication, undermined confidence in the list’s stability over its roughly five-year run.
How Researchers Were Meant to Use CARE — Promotion and API/CAS Scoring
CARE inclusion mattered because it fed directly into the concrete, high-stakes mechanics of Indian academic careers, not just as an informal quality signal. Under UGC’s Career Advancement Scheme (CAS) — the framework that translates a faculty member’s research output into Academic Performance Indicator (API) points used for promotion and appointment eligibility — publications counted toward those API scores only if they appeared in a UGC-CARE-listed journal (or, for older cases, the earlier UGC-Approved List CARE replaced). A researcher whose paper appeared in a non-listed journal risked that publication simply not counting toward the metrics that determined eligibility for promotion, PhD supervision rights, or certain research grants at many Indian institutions — even if the paper itself was methodologically sound and legitimately peer-reviewed. This is the mechanism that made CARE status functionally mandatory in practice for career-stage decisions, despite the list technically being a quality-reference tool rather than a hard legal requirement.
The Current Position (2024-2025 Discontinuation)
UGC’s Commission decided at its 584th meeting (3 October 2024) to discontinue the CARE listing model, acting on the recommendation of an expert committee that reviewed how it had operated since 2019. The committee’s stated concerns, reported consistently across Indian higher-education press coverage of the decision: the list introduced real subjectivity into what was meant to be an objective quality filter, this was a particular problem for non-STEM/humanities disciplines where citation-based and international-indexing signals (the basis for Group II) are structurally weaker or less applicable, and the churn of additions/removals plus journal-cloning fraud had eroded trust in the mechanism itself. UGC formally notified the discontinuation on 11 February 2025.
In place of a centralized list, UGC has directed HEIs to develop their own journal-evaluation mechanisms, guided by a published set of roughly three dozen suggestive parameters grouped under eight broad criteria — covering things like editorial board standards, peer-review and editorial-policy transparency, publication ethics, and journal visibility/impact. The practical effect shifts the evaluation burden from a single national list to each institution’s own committee-level judgment, using UGC’s parameters as guidance rather than a pass/fail gate.
A static reference list of previously CARE-listed journals (reported at roughly 1,474 entries, as of 10 February 2025) remains posted for historical/archival purposes — UGC has been explicit that appearing on that archival snapshot is not current validation or endorsement of a journal’s present quality. CASRAI does not reproduce or link to that list directly here, since it is explicitly non-authoritative going forward and the underlying page is subject to change without notice; researchers who need it should locate it via UGC’s own official channels rather than a third-party mirror.
What This Means for Researchers and Institutions Now
With no active CARE gate, the practical guidance converging across post-discontinuation commentary is to lean on internationally recognized, independently maintained indexes and directories as the primary quality signal instead of a single national list: Scopus, Web of Science, PubMed/MEDLINE, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for open-access titles. None of these are India-specific or UGC-administered, so none of them inherit CARE’s promotion/API-scoring role automatically — that determination now sits with each HEI’s own evaluation committee, applying UGC’s suggestive parameters, until (or unless) UGC issues further national guidance clarifying how CAS/API scoring should treat journal quality post-CARE. Researchers currently mid-promotion-cycle, or relying on a paper’s CARE status for a pending case, should confirm directly with their institution’s academic/research committee how it is currently treating journal-quality evidence, rather than assuming the old CARE-based rule still applies uniformly.
For context on how India’s other centralized research-infrastructure systems are holding up by comparison, see CASRAI’s guides to VIDWAN, India’s national researcher-expert database, and One Nation One Subscription (ONOS), India’s national journal-access scheme — both remain active as of this writing, unlike CARE.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there still a “UGC approved journal list”?
Not as an actively maintained list. UGC discontinued CARE’s ongoing maintenance in the notification dated 11 February 2025. A static archival reference list of previously-listed journals remains posted for historical purposes only, with UGC explicit that inclusion on it does not confirm current quality or endorsement.
Does a paper published in a former CARE-listed journal still “count” for promotion?
This is now a matter for each HEI’s own evaluation committee under UGC’s suggestive parameters framework, not a single national rule. Confirm directly with your institution rather than assuming the pre-2025 CARE rule still applies.
What replaced the Group I/Group II model?
UGC has not introduced a replacement national list. Instead, it published roughly three dozen suggestive parameters under eight broad criteria (editorial board standards, peer-review rigor, publication ethics, journal visibility/impact, and related dimensions) for individual HEIs to apply in their own journal evaluations.
Why was CARE discontinued?
UGC’s Commission cited an expert committee’s findings of subjectivity in the review process — particularly for non-STEM disciplines less well served by citation-based Group II indexing — along with instability from frequent list churn and journal-cloning fraud that undermined confidence in the mechanism.
