Research paper and publication support in Bangalore

Paper rules of the four universities

Look only at the row of your own university. Take a VTU scholar whose USN is from 2021 and who has two UGC-CARE papers. That scholar has not met the rule yet. It is the same for a Bangalore University scholar with one Scopus paper where the guide’s name comes first in the author list. Both type of cases are coming to us quite often.

For VTU you have to read two documents together. Clause 8.1.2 of the 2023 regulations says the papers must be there before the pre-submission colloquium. You can give a reprint or an acceptance letter with your DOI, ORCID or Google Scholar ID. After that, item 13 of the March 2026 checklist gives the quartile rule based on the USN year. For the recent VTU batches, the quartile of the journal is as important as the Scopus indexing itself.

VTU rules on author names, signatures and affiliation

The VTU checklist asks for more than acceptance. Your name and your guide’s name should both be there on the paper. Suppose your guide or co-guide changed in between the PhD, then the published paper also has to show that change. Your Doctoral Committee members sign the papers, and they are submitted in VTU’s Genuineness Certificate format. The 2023 regulations also list the duties of part-time scholars (6.7.3). There it says every paper, single author or joint, should carry the University affiliation.

Before you send the manuscript to any journal, go through the author list and the affiliation line once again. See that your guide is acknowledged also. A paper with only your company address, or one that leaves out your guide, may get published and still it will not count for VTU. Part-time scholars working in Bengaluru IT companies mostly send papers with the employer’s affiliation only. Ask your research centre how they want both to be shown.

Bangalore University, conference papers and UGC-CARE

Clause 17.10 of the 2024 regulations allows two ways. One way is two journal articles with you as the first author. The clause accepts journals that are reputed, refereed or peer-reviewed, or journals listed in UGC CARE. The other way is two conference or seminar papers, again with your name first, and you must have presented them yourself. For both ways the proof is certificates or reprints, and you have to give them in the time of thesis submission.

The conference route takes less time, but be careful in choosing the conference. A genuine conference will have a programme, a review of abstracts and organisers whose names you can check. UGC CARE is still named in that clause. Now go and see the UGC-CARE site itself, as per that site the list was not updated after October 2024, and they have said it will stay like that. If you are depending on a journal only because it “is CARE”, ask your department how they are reading the clause now. Take their reply in writing.

CHRIST, RGUHS and IISc

At CHRIST the journal must be approved by the Centre for Research, as per clause 12.a of the 2022 regulations. Ask them about the journal before sending the manuscript anywhere. In place of one of the two papers you are allowed to show a patent. Only a filed patent is not enough there, it should be published or granted. The format guidelines then say your list of publications and conference presentations is a compulsory appendix in the thesis.

RGUHS asks for four papers, and in each you should be the first or corresponding author. This comes from clause 11.2 of the Revised Ordinance 2021. One paper has to be in an RGUHS journal, and the RGUHS Library does the verification. Getting four papers out of one PhD is not easy. Plan in the first year itself which objective will become which paper.

The rule at IISc is of a different kind. Their Student Information Handbook talks about copyright. The student keeps copyright in the thesis material, and that stays so even after it is transferred to a journal. Keep this in mind while signing a publisher’s copyright form, if later you want to put the published chapter in your thesis.

How it works from Bangalore

First tell us your university and your USN year if you are at VTU, and send us list of papers you already have. We begin by checking how many papers are still pending, and before which meeting. After that we choose one chapter or one objective that can work as a separate paper.

Then we make a shortlist of journals. Against each journal we write why it suits your work and whether it meets your university’s rule. We also check its ISSN is really listed in Scopus or Web of Science. Next, we shape the chapter into a paper along with you, edit it with tracked changes and format it as per the journal’s author guidelines. After the review, we help you reply to each reviewer comment.

Acceptance we cannot promise, because the journal editors decide that. Some journals are offering a paid slot within two weeks, we don’t send papers to them. Our part is to see that the editors get a clean paper with a clear argument.