The UGC CARE list, explained

What the UGC-CARE list was

UGC-CARE stands for the UGC Consortium for Academic and Research Ethics. It was set up by a UGC public notice dated 28 November 2018, and its journal list went live in 2019, replacing the earlier “UGC Approved List of Journals”. That older list had drawn criticism: a study from Savitribai Phule Pune University, which went on to host the CARE list, found a large share of its journals to be of poor quality or outright predatory.

The CARE list was meant to fix that by being curated rather than open-ended. It had two parts, and a point that was often misunderstood: the groups were not a ranking. The UGC-CARE FAQ says so explicitly. Group I was not “better” than Group II or the other way round. They were simply two routes into the list.

Why it mattered so much

In practice the list became a gatekeeper for careers. University PhD ordinances, faculty recruitment and the Academic Performance Indicator scores used in promotions often referred to UGC’s journal list. That gave the list enormous commercial value, and that value also attracted misuse.

Clone journals

The biggest challenge of the CARE era was cloning. Many Group I journals were small print publications, often society or departmental journals and many in Indian languages, with little or no web presence. Copycat operators built websites using the same title and the same ISSN, then advertised “UGC-CARE approved publication” for a fee.

A scholar searching for the journal online would find the clone first, because the genuine journal had no website at all. They would submit, pay a “processing fee”, and receive a PDF that looked like a published paper. Months later a verification check would reveal that the real journal had never published the article.

The UGC-CARE site itself maintained separate cloned-journal lists for Group I and Group II because the problem was so widespread. Group II journals were not immune either: hijackers also copied Scopus-indexed titles, and some Group II journals fell out of the list when Scopus or Web of Science discontinued them.

What UGC changed in 2025, date by date

1. 3 October 2024: at its 584th meeting, the Commission decides, on an expert committee’s recommendation, to discontinue UGC-CARE listing of journals and develop suggestive parameters for choosing peer-reviewed journals.
2. 11 February 2025: a public notice (F.No. 1-1/2018(CARE/JOURNAL)) announces the decision, supersedes the 2018 notice that created UGC-CARE, and publishes draft parameters for public feedback until 25 February 2025.
3. 24 June 2025: at its 591st meeting, the Commission approves the final suggestive parameters after considering feedback.
4. 16 July 2025: a further public notice circulates the approved parameters and publishes a list of 1,474 UGC-CARE listed journals as on 10 February 2025, “for referencing purposes”. The notice states that inclusion or exclusion of a journal in that list “does not imply validation or endorsement by the Commission.”

Note the last point carefully. The archived list is a historical record, not a current approval. A journal on it may have deteriorated since; a good journal missing from it has not been judged bad.

The suggestive parameters

Instead of one national list, UGC now gives higher education institutions a checklist of parameters in eight groups, and suggests they set up internal committees to adapt it to their disciplines. Summarised:

If you have read our predatory journal checklist, most of this will look familiar: it is essentially a structured version of the same due diligence any careful researcher should do.

What this means for you as a PhD scholar

Your university’s rules now matter more than UGC’s list

The UGC (Minimum Standards and Procedure for Award of Ph.D. Degree) Regulations, 2022 already removed the national requirement to publish before thesis submission (the details are in our guide to whether publication is mandatory for a PhD). But many universities kept their own publication requirement in their PhD ordinances, and many of those ordinances were written with the words “UGC-CARE listed”.

With the list discontinued, universities are handling this in different ways. Some refer to the archived list, some specify Scopus or Web of Science only, some have issued their own approved lists using the new parameters, and some have not yet updated their wording at all. There is no single uniform approach yet, so practice varies by university. Ask your research or PhD cell what they currently accept, and ask before you choose a journal rather than after.

If you published in a CARE-listed journal before February 2025

Nothing in UGC’s notices retrospectively invalidates earlier publications. If the journal was genuinely on the list when your paper appeared (and you published in the genuine journal, not a clone), keep evidence: a screenshot or PDF of the listing, the issue details and the journal’s ISSN. Whether a university accepts it for a particular purpose is still that university’s decision.

If you are choosing a journal now

The safest journals for most purposes are those whose status you can verify independently and which your university names explicitly. Typically these are Scopus-indexed or Web of Science-indexed titles, or journals on your university’s own list. For fields where good Indian-language or regional journals are not in those databases, the new parameters are the right lens: check the editorial board, review policy, archive and ethics policies yourself.

Are Scopus journals UGC approved?

Not any more. No journal is “UGC approved” today, Scopus-indexed or otherwise.

While the CARE list ran, the answer was mostly yes. The UGC-CARE FAQ said that any journal indexed in Scopus or Web of Science was part of Group II, with no need to apply separately. There were catches even then. The same FAQ said journals in Web of Science’s Emerging Sources Citation Index were not in Group II, and that a paper in a Scopus journal that had been removed from the CARE list would not be considered for academic purposes. So “it’s in Scopus” was never quite the same as “it’s UGC-CARE”.

The 11 February 2025 public notice ended that link. It discontinued CARE listing altogether and put forward suggestive parameters in its place. Those parameters mention “indexation in reputed databases” and CiteScore, but they don’t name Scopus or any other database, and they don’t approve anything. They are a checklist for institutions.

In practice, whether a Scopus paper counts for your PhD now depends on your university’s ordinance. Several of the ordinances we have read name Scopus directly; some add a quartile, exclude conference proceedings, or still say “UGC-CARE” and leave the research cell to interpret it. Our guide to the PhD publication requirement summarises what several universities currently ask for.

When an email offers publication in a “UGC-approved Scopus journal”, ignore the UGC half. Check the Scopus half yourself by ISSN, then check it against your own ordinance.

How to verify a journal today

Whatever your university’s rule, the underlying checks are the same. Work through them in this order:

• Get the ISSN from a document, not a website. Use the ISSN printed on a physical copy, on the archived UGC-CARE list, or on the ISSN Portal. Never use the one shown on a site that emailed you.
• Check the ISSN on the ISSN Portal (portal.issn.org). Confirm the title, country and publisher match what you expect.
• Check indexing directly. Search Scopus Sources and the Web of Science Master Journal List by ISSN. If the journal is open access, also search DOAJ.
• Match the website. The URL listed in the database (or on the publisher’s printed copy) should be the site you submit through. A different domain with the same title is the classic clone pattern.
• Check the archived UGC-CARE list if your university still refers to it. Inclusion there is now for reference only and is not an endorsement.
• Read your own university’s current rule. Ask the research cell or your supervisor which journals count for your PhD, and get the answer in writing if it matters for your submission.

For step-by-step instructions on the Scopus part, see our guide to checking Scopus indexing. For what numbers like CiteScore and quartiles mean when you find them, see impact factor, quartiles and h-index explained.

Applying the new parameters yourself

You don’t need a committee to use UGC’s parameters. Give each journal twenty minutes:

• Read three recent articles. Are they in scope, properly referenced, and work you’d want your name beside?
• Look up two editorial board members independently. Do they exist, and do they list this journal on their own profiles?
• Find the review policy, fee information, archive, stated publication time and acceptance rate. Are they there, and plausible?

Common misconceptions about the UGC-CARE list

• “There is a UGC CARE list 2026.” There isn’t. Files circulating under that name are either the archived February 2025 list or unofficial compilations. The only official one is on ugc.gov.in and is labelled as a reference.
• “Group I is higher quality than Group II.” The groups were never a ranking; UGC-CARE’s own FAQ says so.
• “If a journal’s website shows the UGC-CARE logo, it was listed.” Logos cost nothing to copy. Only the list itself, checked by ISSN and website, ever proved anything.
• “UGC has banned publishing in formerly listed journals.” It has not. It has stopped maintaining a list and asked institutions to judge journals using parameters.