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View all search resultsHigh rankings, low reach in Indonesian journals
This is the hallmark of what the academic community recognizes as citation rings: coordinated, often tacit agreements among affiliated journals to cite one another's work, artificially inflating impact metrics.
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Graduation day illustration (Unsplash)
B
ehind the quiet walls of university campuses, a story has been quietly unfolding and sending ripples of astonishment through the global academic community, particularly among legal scholars. The source of their bewilderment: the seemingly meteoric rise of Indonesian law journals, especially those specializing in Islamic law, to the upper echelons of international rankings.
In 2025, around seven Indonesian law journals broke into SCimago's global top one hundred. The year before, 11 had done so. SCimago remains the most widely consulted authority for international journal rankings, making these placements anything but trivial.
More remarkable still is where these journals come from. Almost without exception, they are affiliated with state Islamic higher education institutions — known locally as PTKIN. Ijtihad, published by Islamic State University (UIN) Salatiga, sits at position 25, ahead of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review (26), the Duke Law Journal (30) and the California Law Review (34). El-Mashlahah from State Institute of Islamic Studies (IAIN) Palangkaraya (46), Al-Manahij from UIN Purwokerto (58) and Juris from UIN Batusangkar (73) place above the UCLA Law Review (75) and the venerable American Journal of International Law (76).
All told, around 22 Indonesian law journals now hold the coveted Scopus Q1 designation, with PTKIN institutions accounting for the overwhelming majority.
For a decade, Indonesian universities have pursued what some have come to call "Scopusization", a systematic, government-backed drive to integrate Indonesian academic output into globally indexed platforms. The ambition was clear: to elevate Indonesian higher education onto the world stage.
The policy machinery behind this push was considerable. Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform Minister’s Regulation (Permen PANRB) No. 17/2013, later amended by No. 46/2013, made publication in Scopus-indexed journals a formal professional requirement for lecturers. The Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry reinforced this through Regulation No. 20/2017, which tied Scopus publication to the criteria for attaining a full professorship.
The effects were immediate and wide-ranging. Lecturers raced to publish, campus journals competed fiercely for indexing and writing workshops proliferated across the country.
