Unlock The Secrets Of Indonesian Research A Comprehensive Guide To Finding Sinta 1 And 2 Journals

Where to Actually Find Sinta 1 and 2 Journals

The Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture runs the Science and Technology Index, commonly called Sinta. It ranks journals and conferences on a scale from 1 through 6. Sinta 1 and Sinta 2 are the tiers most academics care about because they matter for promotion files, doctoral qualifying exams, and grant applications. Getting to the actual list of qualified journals is simpler than people think, but there are enough traps along the way that I have rewritten my process three times over the last five years. I start by going straight to sinta.kemdikbud.go.id and clicking on the Jurnal menu. The interface is not beautiful, but it works. You can filter by subject, ranking, publisher, and language. The export function gives you a CSV that contains roughly forty fields including the ISSNs, coverage dates, and the current Sinta score. That CSV is your primary working file. I then cross-reference it against the Scopus list and the DOAJ registry to catch journals that may be Sinta 2 but have dropped off one of the two external databases.

Unlock The Secrets Of Indonesian Research A Comprehensive Guide To Finding Sinta 1 And 2 Journals

Here is the practical workflow I use when I need a clean list for a department or a grant proposal. Open the Sinta portal and select Jurnal Indonesia if you want only nationally indexed outlets, or Jurnal Internasional Terakreditasi if you need the international category. Sinta 1 journals sit inside both groups, but Sinta 2 splits differently depending on the panel. The panel assignment matters more than most people realize because a journal ranked Sinta 2 by the engineering panel will carry a different weight than the same journal ranked by the social science panel. After you pull the CSV, import it into a spreadsheet program. Remove duplicate rows based on the ISSN field. Duplicate records appear sometimes because a journal has both a print and an electronic ISSN and Sinta lists them separately. Then delete any rows where the Status column says Non-Akreditasi or Tidak Aktif. Journals go inactive for administrative reasons, not just quality reasons. A university presses sometimes loses its accreditation status during a funding audit without the journal's editorial quality changing at all. For the actual download, Sinta does not provide a direct one-click file for the full ranked list anymore. The page requires you to set filters and then click the download button. I keep a bookmarked query with the filters pre-set to Sinta 1 and Sinta 2 across all subject panels, which saves about three minutes each time I run it. Those three minutes add up over a semester.

There is a less obvious step that catches people. Sinta numbers can be updated every six months during a panel evaluation cycle. If you download a list in January and someone checks it in August, some journal rankings will have shifted. I learned this the hard way when I submitted a publication list for a lecturer's promotion package and the committee flagged two journals that had moved from Sinta 2 to Sinta 3 between the download date and the review date. The workaround was to note the download date in the covering memo and attach a screenshot of the Sinta search results showing the rankings on that exact date. The committee accepted it on the second submission without further argument. Another detail people miss involves the difference between Sinta 1 and Sinta 2 in terms of what the ranking actually measures. Sinta 1 journals typically have higher citation clustering, more regular peer review turnaround, and stronger editorial board visibility. Sinta 2 journals often meet those standards at a slightly lower threshold. The gap is not always wide. A well-run Sinta 2 journal in applied mathematics will usually outperform a poorly managed Sinta 1 journal in a niche humanities subfield when you measure citation speed and rejection rate. I recommend looking at the metrics tab inside the journal's Sinta profile rather than relying solely on the ranking number. The metrics show the total documents, citations, h-index, and normalised citation performance. Those numbers tell you more about day-to-day usefulness than the single digit rank. If you need journals outside the Indonesian panel system, there are complementary sources. Scopus offers an approved journal list that overlaps heavily with Sinta 1 and Sinta 2 but includes many non-Indonesian titles. Google Scholar Metrics provides a separate ranking that uses a different algorithm and tends to favour open access outlets. Neither system replaces Sinta for local evaluation purposes, but they serve as useful cross-checks. I run a quick comparison for any journal I am recommending to a graduate student who plans to publish abroad. If a journal is Sinta 2 but absent from Scopus entirely, I flag that for the student because it may create friction during a postdoctoral job market application.

Here are the specific problems I run into most often and how I handle them. Journal name changes. Sinta sometimes lists an old title alongside a new one during transition periods. The CSV does not always flag this clearly. I search the new title in the Sinta database and verify the ISSN linkage before including the journal in a formal list. Subject classification mismatches. A journal may be classified under a broader panel than its content warrants. I check the editorial scope description on the journal's own website to confirm alignment with the intended research area.

Open access versus subscription confusion. Some Sinta 2 journals are fully open access with article processing charges around two to five million rupiah per paper. Others are subscription based with optional open access for an extra fee. The Sinta export does not include APC information, so I verify this directly on the publisher's author guidelines page before advising anyone to submit. The main downside of relying on Sinta rankings is that the system favours established publishers. New journals, regional university presses, and community-based publications often struggle to reach Sinta 2 within the first evaluation cycle because they lack sufficient citation history. If your research focuses on local indigenous knowledge or community development, you may find that the most relevant outlets sit at Sinta 3 or unranked. In those cases, publishing elsewhere does not automatically mean lower quality, but it will not count toward Sinta-based evaluation criteria. I tell early career researchers to check the publication policy of their home institution first. Some universities accept Sinta 3 journals for certain promotion tracks, while others require Sinta 2 minimum. If you want a faster way to manage this over time, I keep a personal spreadsheet with columns for journal title, ISSN, Sinta rank, panel, status, download date, and notes on APC and indexing overlap. When Sinta releases a new evaluation period, I update the ranks and highlight any changes in red. The spreadsheet approach takes about twenty minutes per update cycle and keeps you from re-downloading and re-importing the CSV blindly.

The Sinta portal remains the authoritative source for Indonesian journal rankings. Use it directly, verify dates, and do not treat a single download as a permanent record. The rankings shift, journal statuses change, and a list that looked solid in Q1 can look different by Q3. A careful, dated workflow saves more time than hunting for a shortcut.