Automobile Engineering Journal (JOAEA): Scope, Indexing and How to Publish in 2026

Most automotive journals are run by professors. This one is run by a man who develops exhaust after-treatment systems at a commercial vehicle manufacturer.

That is not a small detail. If your paper is about a working vehicle system — an EV powertrain, a braking strategy, an emissions result — it will be read by someone who has shipped that kind of work into production, not only studied it.

The Journal of Automobile Engineering and Applications (JOAEA) is a peer-reviewed, hybrid open access automobile engineering journal published since 2014 by STM Journals, focused on rapid publication of fundamental research across automobile engineering and its applications.

Here is what it covers, who runs it, and what submitting actually involves.

What JOAEA Covers

The scope is broad by design: all areas of automobile engineering and applications. In practice, this automobile engineering journal has become heavily weighted toward electric mobility, which reflects where the field itself has moved.

Every paper accepted by this automobile engineering journal gets a DOI The complete Focus and Scope is on the journal page.

The Work Being Published Right Now

Read the recent issues and a clear pattern emerges. Four areas dominate.

Electric Vehicle Design and Powertrains

This is currently the busiest area in the journal. BLDC and hub motors, field-oriented control, DC-DC converters, battery systems, protection circuits. Two-wheeler and light EV work is especially well represented — scooters, e-bikes, last-mile vehicles.

Vehicle Safety and Driver Assistance

ADAS implementations, forward collision avoidance, automatic braking, blind spot detection, driver drowsiness monitoring. Recent work in this area uses ultrasonic sensing, eye aspect ratio and facial landmark detection, built and tested rather than only simulated.

Sustainable and Alternative Mobility

Solar-assisted vehicles, photovoltaic charging, renewable-powered transport. Work driven by fuel dependency and urban air quality rather than performance alone.

Powertrain, Emissions and After-Treatment

Given the editorial leadership, work on exhaust systems, after-treatment and emissions control sits naturally within scope, and submissions in this area reach an editor with direct industry experience in it.

Recent Papers

Three examples that show the standard and style.

An Experimental Analysis on Enhancement of Electric Vehicle Safety using ADAS Technology and Forward Collision Avoidance with an Automatic Braking System — Nayak, Hossain and Gupta note that human error accounts for roughly 90% of accidents in congested urban conditions, then build and test an ADAS stack combining ultrasonic ranging, blind spot detection and drowsiness monitoring using eye aspect ratio and facial landmarks.

Design Optimization and Performance Study of An Electric Scooter — Yadav and Chauhan work through the component stack of an electric scooter: BLDC hub motor, field-oriented control, DC-DC conversion, permanent magnet design and circuit protection, against the backdrop of India’s two-wheeler EV growth.

Design and Performance Evaluation of a Solar-Assisted Electric Bicycle for Sustainable Urban Transportation — Savita and colleagues integrate photovoltaic charging into an electric bicycle and evaluate its real performance for urban use.

The common thread: a defined vehicle system, a built implementation, measured results. Theory-only submissions without a physical or clearly modelled system are rarer here.

Indexing and Metrics

This automobile engineering journal is indexed in Google Scholar, Advanced Science Index, Index Copernicus, Scientific Literature (SCILIT) and SJIF.

Its Index Copernicus Value was 53.42 in 2022. SJIF has been stable through the decade, moving from 6.175 in 2020 to 6.013 in 2024.

Say the quiet part out loud: JOAEA is not currently indexed in Web of Science or Scopus, and SJIF is not Clarivate’s Journal Impact Factor. If your department counts only WoS or Scopus publications toward a thesis or promotion, confirm your own requirements before you submit. If your aim is a peer-reviewed, DOI-assigned, Google Scholar-discoverable record of working automotive research, this journal delivers that.

Who Runs the Journal

The Editor-in-Chief is Dr. Karthikeyan Subramanian, Senior Manager for Exhaust and After-treatment Product Development at the Ashok Leyland Technical Centre in Tamil Nadu.

This is unusual, and it is an advantage for a certain kind of author. An industry editor evaluates whether a result would hold on a real vehicle, under real duty cycles, at real cost. If your paper is applied — a control strategy, a thermal management approach, an emissions reduction method — that is the right reader. If your work is purely theoretical with no path to implementation, it is worth considering whether this is the right venue.

The wider board includes practising researchers from a range of institutions.

How to Submit

Check the fit. Your paper needs a vehicle or vehicle-system core: powertrain, chassis, safety, emissions, control, or an EV subsystem. General mechanical design with no automotive application tends to fall outside scope.

Follow the guidelines. The Author Guidelines and Instructions for Authors cover structure, references and figure requirements.

Submit through the portal. Upload via the manuscript submission system, which gives you status tracking and a direct line to the editorial office.

Check the APC. As a hybrid open access journal, JOAEA charges a processing fee for open access publication. See the Article Processing Charges page.

What Reviewers Will Look For

Automotive papers get sent back for predictable reasons. Clear these before submitting.

• Full system specification. Motor rating and type, battery chemistry and capacity, controller, sensor part numbers, vehicle mass. “A BLDC motor” is not reproducible.
• Real operating conditions. Load, speed range, terrain, ambient temperature, duty cycle. Bench results under ideal conditions are weak evidence.
• Quantified performance with units. Range, efficiency, braking distance, detection latency, emissions figures. Not “improved significantly”.
• Repeat trials. How many runs, and the variation across them. One test is an anecdote.
• A comparison baseline. Your system against the conventional one, or a published alternative, under matched conditions.
• Safety claims tested, not asserted. If you claim collision avoidance, show the test protocol, the approach speeds and the failure cases.
• Cost and practicality addressed. An industry editor will ask what this costs and whether it scales. Answering it preemptively strengthens the paper.
• Current references. Automotive technology moves fast; a reference list ending in 2018 reads as dated.

Conclusion

This automobile engineering journal will not substitute for an SAE or Elsevier automotive title if your institution requires Web of Science indexing. That constraint is real and worth checking first.

What this automobile engineering journal does offer is specific and, for the right author, valuable: a decade-old peer-reviewed venue with an Ashok Leyland powertrain engineer as Editor-in-Chief, three issues a year, DOI assignment, and a demonstrated appetite for applied EV, vehicle safety and sustainable mobility work — including the kind of built-and-tested projects that larger journals often consider too small.

For a master’s or doctoral project on an EV subsystem, an ADAS implementation with real test data, or an applied powertrain study, that combination fits well. Researchers working on the electronics and control side of these systems may also want to look at the mechatronics journal JOMA, which covers overlapping ground.

If that describes your work, read the author guidelines, work through the checklist above, and submit your manuscript.

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