High rankings, low reach in Indonesian journals

High rankings, low reach in Indonesian journals

The Jakarta Post

Behind 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 State Islamic 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) Palangka Raya (46), Al-Manahij from UIN Purwokerto (58) and Juris from UIN Batusangkar (73) place above the UCLA Law Review (75) and the Vanderbilt 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 may 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 on the world stage.

The policy machinery behind this push was considerable. Administrative and bureaucratic reform later amended by Regulation 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 professorship.

The effects were immediate and wide-ranging. Lecturers raced to publish, campuses journal competed fiercely for indexing and writing workshops proliferated across the country.

Seen in this light, the ascent of Indonesian journals reads as a natural, even deserved, culmination of years of institutional investment and individual effort. Many have celebrated it as precisely that.

But a closer look at the data raises serious pause. I conducted a focused study, examining the three most-cited articles from each of the three highest-ranking Indonesian journals.

The most cited article in Juris, “The Construction of Islamic Inheritance Law: A Comparative Study of the Islamic Jurisprudence and the Compilation of Islamic Law” was cited 44 times. El-Mashlahah’s “Land Reform Policy in Determining Abandoned Land for Halal Tourism Destination Management Based on Fiqh Siyasa” has 22. Ijtihad’s “Halal Tourism Regulation in Indonesia: Trend and Dynamics in The Digital Era” has 35.

For articles less than five years old, these figures would ordinarily suggest genuine scholarly impact.

The question that matters is who made the citations. For journals claiming a place among the world’s top one hundred, one would reasonably expect citations from legal scholars across a broad range of countries and institutions. That expectation, data reveals, is not being met.

Nearly every citation to these top-cited articles traces back to other journals within the PTKIN network. Not a single article or scholar from outside Indonesia appears among the citers of the works examined.

Samarah, a journal from Aceh, cited the lead Juris article more than 10 times. El-Usrah, also from Aceh, cited it nine times. Ihyaul—itself a Scopus Q1 journal—also based in Aceh—cited it seven times. The same closed loop appears when examining the top-cited articles from El-Mashlahah and Ijtihad: citations flow exclusively from other PTKIN journals, spread across Indonesian cities, but never beyond Indonesian borders.

This is the hallmark of what academics call citation rings: coordinated, often tacit agreements among affiliated journals to cite one another’s work, artificially inflating impact metrics. There are also signs of citation stuffing: the practice of padding reference lists with unnecessary citations to boost the cited journal’s standing. The Juris article, for example, draws on roughly 60 references, yet only four are Indonesian. Of its English-language citations, nearly all come from international scholars working in the field.

The conclusion is stark. Despite their elite global rankings, articles in PTKIN journals remain profoundly local in reach and influence. They are written by PTKIN academics, published in PTKIN institutions and read, insofar as “citation” can be taken as a proxy for readership, almost exclusively by other PTKIN academics.

These journals have entered a global platform while remaining within a self-contained world, circulating among the same actors, in the same arena, untouched by the wider academic conversation they nominally belong to.

None of this is to diminish the genuine effort that has gone into building Indonesia’s academic publishing infrastructure.

But achievement on paper must be matched by impact in practice. The aspiration, after all, was never merely administrative. It was to place Indonesian scholarship in genuine dialogue with the global academic community.

The responsibility for addressing this does not rest with PTKIN institutions alone. The Research, Technology and Higher Education Ministry must also reckon with the situation its own policies have created. The incentive structures that rewarded indexing above substance have produced predictable distortions—and they are not confined to the humanities or Islamic studies.

The path forward begins with honesty—not merely institutional honesty—and a willingness to measure success by standards that cannot be gamed.

Indonesian journals are increasingly visible to the international scholarly community, and that visibility is a double-edged thing. The same scrutiny that might one day bring recognition can just as readily bring reputational damage that proves far harder to repair than rankings are to inflate.

Indonesia’s academic community has demonstrated that it can build. The harder, more urgent task now is to build something that lasts.

By Zezen Zaenal Mutaqin

Director of Center for International Law, Indonesian Institute for Foreign Affairs (IIFA), the Indonesian International Islamic University (UIII)