Indian Economics and Indian Scholarly Publishing: is there Room for Current Science?

Multidisciplinary science journals include a few papers in economics. However, very few papers in economics appear in Current Science, itself a multidisciplinary journal. This article reports the results obtained from our analysis of the possible reasons for this situation. A study of almost 6500 articles from the journal's archives led us to the conclusion that the proportion of the journal's papers in the field of economics is very small, less than 0.5%. Thus we conducted an e-mail survey with 43 Indian authors publishing in Indian economics journals, asking them whether or not they had submitted any manuscript to Current Science and what were the reasons for this decision. Then, following a quantitative analysis, we constructed a model that represented the different argumentation strategies used by our sample of authors. Our main conclusion is that it is a lack of communication between economics researchers and the journal itself that creates disciplinary gaps in the multidisciplinary nature of Current Science.