In the second part of a five-part series, Bar & Bench interviews the editorial board of some of the more popular legal journals in the country..In this piece, the team at the Indian Journal of Law & Technology talks about the selection process followed, challenges faced by academic journals, and the most common errors that authors make..Bar & Bench: Broadly speaking, what are some characteristics that all good articles have?.IJLT: Most good articles are well structured and informative to the reader, and contribute a novel perspective along with providing a good overview of the subject. Our main focus is to find articles pertaining to the field of law and technology, preferably with an original and developing country-centric perspective..B&B: How are editorial board members selected?.IJLT: The members are selected through a three-stage procedure. They are required to complete a short article on a suggested topic of law and technology, followed by a line editing and board review of a given article. Selection is based on the points garnered from external judging of the same, along with prior editorial experience..B&B: What is the editorial procedure once a submission is received? Do you have blind reviews?.IJLT: Once a submission is received, we first subject it to our internal review process, where two of the board members judge it according to the factors on our board review form and decide whether to accept the article. Following this, it goes through our peer review process, where we send it to external scholars and experts in the field of law and technology to suggest changes and look for any mistakes in it..B&B: What are some of the common errors that you notice in submissions? .IJLT: The two main problems we face when we receive submissions are lack of consistency with our mandate and plagiarised content. Our journal is specific in dealing with issues of law and technology, such as intellectual property, innovation, internet governance, media law, etc. Very often authors do not read through our mandate and tend to send us unrelated material. Further, many times articles are either intentionally plagiarised from other sources or do not properly cite their sources. We stress on the importance of this since academic integrity is of great importance while trying to maintain the quality of a journal..B&B: Thoughts on present academic research environment in Indian law schools? .IJLT: Unlike western educational institutions, there does not appear to us to be much encouragement of good quality research and writing by both students and professors. Having a system to allow students to better comprehend how to write research papers and make novel contributions to the field will be of great use..The IJLT Editorial Board consists of L. Gopika Murthy, Swati Muthukumar, Aditi Shukla, Aradhya Sethia, Divij Joshi, Saiya Savooji, Anumeha Saxena, Shreya Kundu, and Kaustubh Chaturvedi..You can also read our interview of the Editorial Board of the NUJS Law Review.
In the second part of a five-part series, Bar & Bench interviews the editorial board of some of the more popular legal journals in the country..In this piece, the team at the Indian Journal of Law & Technology talks about the selection process followed, challenges faced by academic journals, and the most common errors that authors make..Bar & Bench: Broadly speaking, what are some characteristics that all good articles have?.IJLT: Most good articles are well structured and informative to the reader, and contribute a novel perspective along with providing a good overview of the subject. Our main focus is to find articles pertaining to the field of law and technology, preferably with an original and developing country-centric perspective..B&B: How are editorial board members selected?.IJLT: The members are selected through a three-stage procedure. They are required to complete a short article on a suggested topic of law and technology, followed by a line editing and board review of a given article. Selection is based on the points garnered from external judging of the same, along with prior editorial experience..B&B: What is the editorial procedure once a submission is received? Do you have blind reviews?.IJLT: Once a submission is received, we first subject it to our internal review process, where two of the board members judge it according to the factors on our board review form and decide whether to accept the article. Following this, it goes through our peer review process, where we send it to external scholars and experts in the field of law and technology to suggest changes and look for any mistakes in it..B&B: What are some of the common errors that you notice in submissions? .IJLT: The two main problems we face when we receive submissions are lack of consistency with our mandate and plagiarised content. Our journal is specific in dealing with issues of law and technology, such as intellectual property, innovation, internet governance, media law, etc. Very often authors do not read through our mandate and tend to send us unrelated material. Further, many times articles are either intentionally plagiarised from other sources or do not properly cite their sources. We stress on the importance of this since academic integrity is of great importance while trying to maintain the quality of a journal..B&B: Thoughts on present academic research environment in Indian law schools? .IJLT: Unlike western educational institutions, there does not appear to us to be much encouragement of good quality research and writing by both students and professors. Having a system to allow students to better comprehend how to write research papers and make novel contributions to the field will be of great use..The IJLT Editorial Board consists of L. Gopika Murthy, Swati Muthukumar, Aditi Shukla, Aradhya Sethia, Divij Joshi, Saiya Savooji, Anumeha Saxena, Shreya Kundu, and Kaustubh Chaturvedi..You can also read our interview of the Editorial Board of the NUJS Law Review.
