A journal can be called a ‘national’ journal on the basis of its production, reception and impact factors. It should have good number of subscription from reputed institutions and organizations within a country. The term ‘national’ should not be considered as a qualitative term in relation to term like ‘international’, for many good journals are produced in regional languages which, though publishing excellent contents, may not be accessible to the international readers. The terms ‘national’ and ‘international’ should be considered descriptive ones for describing geographical location of its production and reception.
A journal may be called an “international journal” on the basis of certain criteria. With the arrival of online journals, certain new points should be noted:
A) An international journal should have international subscribers from a good number of countries. It is not sufficient to have international authors or editors to call a journal ‘international’. Rather a journal has to be judged on the basis of its reception by the readers/users and by its impact in the field of research.
B) The best way to judge is to see whether the journal is included in international directories and databases like EBSCO, Elsevier, MLA, DOAJ, Ulrichs etc.
C) Many universities have digital libraries and it is to be noted whether the journal is included in reputed institutional digital libraries. However, this is applicable for online journals.
D) Then, the quality of the journal has to be judged on the basis of its citation index. Google Scholar can be used to see how often articles from the journal are cited.
E) For scientific journal Thompson Reuters Impact Factor has to be considered.
F) In the wake of “publish or perish” policy, many fake journals have popped up both in electronic and print formats and they claim to be ‘international’ on some dubious criteria in order to earn money from the authors. Many use ISSN as standard of quality. But ISSN is not indicative of policy; rather its value is in numerical indexing of periodicals. A strict policy should be formed internationally for allowing a journal such terms on the header or in the title itself. An international authoritative body should be there to issue such certificates.
…interdisciplinary studies is the need of the hour. The fundamental idea for interdisciplinarity derives from an evolutionary necessity; namely the need to confront and interpret complex systems. To put it simply this means that [a] the entities that we investigate within the environment of contemporary science are perceived to be more like organic or interrelated complexes. The entity that is studied [say like one from logistics, or psychiatry, or dietary cuisine, for examples] can no longer be analyzed in terms of an object of ‘biology’ or ‘chemistry’, but as a contending hierarchy of components which could be studied under the rubric of multiple or variable branches of knowledge. Thus for example a health insurance program involves a consideration of [economics] distribution of wealth, pharmacology, social behaviour, statistics, and probability. Any policy decision on implementation of a viable health care system will have to factor in knowledge from multiple disciplines. Human knowledge can no longer be classified in accordance with the academic compartmentalisations of even classical 19th century science.
Furthermore, processes of nature would have to be deciphered as a combinatorial operation of both scientific and emergent characteristic s. This is especially true of aesthetic reflexes which are a vital part of human behaviour. Singing, Darwin said, is an example of antiphonal harmony that originated in mating calls. A piece of communication—be it a dance performance or a visually textured painting—offers an entire range of acculturation.
Again the beauty of a piece –and frankly speaking – its complexity lies almost beyond the human capacity of reconstructive integration; any piece of art remains unique and unreduplicated in this sense.
The Humanities may be the only discipline outside the new ‘sciences’ that affords an opportunity for studying the most subtle or occluded forces that shape and retain stable forms of communal beliefs and rituals. The combined and orchestrated multi-functionalism of nature gives rise to such moments as those of memory, excitability, preference, suppression, and harmonization. The neuro- aesthetics of cultural expression are still unknown to us. First, there is hardly any consensus on the exact nature of human consciousness, let alone the entire range of deviant functions or multi-tasking that the brain is capable of. As far as aesthetics is concerned, we have to re-define the propensity for parallel perceptions, or what Aristotle unerringly called mimicry, which might help in explaining the capacity and /or competence in designing and short-routing experiences of ‘metaphor’ and allegorical images, or things like suggestivity and excitability [of emotions].
I am inclined to believe that the first steps in this direction could be taken through a fuller knowledge of pharmacological sciences and clinical anatomy, reflexology or discharge behaviour, learning, and sensitization through acts of communalisation.
Another interesting project that has to be undertaken is a study related to the conditions of experience we associate with such states as those of ‘god’ or ‘immortality’.
But there may be something irreducible in the components of experience, and therefore of knowledge itself which derives from the former. Either this, or the other position has to accepted. According to the anthropic principle there is no vantage point and that we are by nature not equipped to know, or gather total knowledge – however small or exclusive the domain may be. Perhaps the latter position is more modest and appropriate here. Unknowability is no safe haven—but a form of recognizing the complexity and paradigmatic failure of intuition.
–From Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities , Volume I, Number 2, Autumn 2009, PDF URL of the editorial: www.rupkatha.com/0102editorial.pdf, © www.rupkatha.com
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Anita Singh, Banaras Hindu University, Uttar Pradesh, India
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