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8.3 National Citation Report - Malaysia
8.3.2 Scientific Collaboration and Cooperation
Data from the NCR-Malaysia is also used to identify scientific collaboration and cooperation between countries as publications or papers with addresses from institutions in different countries are indicated and can be identified to indicate collaboration between countries.
In general collaborative work among Malaysians and most of the other nations of the world ranging from Algeria to Zimbabwe was evident. As shown in Figure 8.10, the highest collaboration or cooperative work for Malaysia was with England where a total of 944 source papers carried these countries in their addresses indicating collaboration. This is followed by the United States and Australia. It may be said that collaborative or cooperative work seems to be guided by research interest and language compatibility rather than geographic proximity.
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In terms of institutional or organisational collaboration, USM was the most active in its collaborative effort. Data from the NCR shows that the highest cooperative work was between Universiti Sains Malaysia and Nanjing University of China where a total of 179 source papers carried the names of these organizations. This is shown in Figure 8.11.
Publication output and citation impact of Malaysian institutions/ organizations is shown in Figure 8.12. On examining output by organisations’ or institutions’ names, it may be said that the universities with a longer history tends tend to have higher output and citation impact. Figure 8.12 shows Universiti Malaya has the highest number of papers at 4079 papers which received a total of 18859 citations. Next in line is USM at almost half the output level of Universiti Malaya and citation impact, followed by UPM and UKM. Among the public research Institutes in Malaysia, the Institute of Medical Research (IMR) and Palm Oil Research Institute of Malaysia (PORIM)
were the highest contributors with 128 and 93 papers respectively. The citations these papers received totaled 799 for IMR and 427 for PORIM.
On examining the cited papers among these organisations showed that the significance of their influence as they received an average of 6.24 cites per paper in the case of the IMR and 4.59 cites per paper in the case of PORIM as compared to 4.62 cites per paper for University of Malaya and 2.71 cites per paper for USM.
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Figure 8.13 shows the percentage of papers cited relative to the world for all fields for selected countries in five year overlapping periods. As can be seen the citation impact of papers from the UK took the lead in the early eighties but was overtaken by the US in the late eighties and early nineties and the US currently leads the way. Asian counterparts on the other hand, lagged far behind at under 1% although in the case of Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan and
South Korea, the percent cited relative to the world shows an increase in the mid-nineties.
For Malaysia, in terms of citations, the percentage of Malaysian papers cited remained around 1% and had not seen any significant increase over the period of 1981-2002.
Figure 8.14 shows the citation impact of Malaysian papers by fields for the period 1981-2002. The fields that received the highest number of citations in Malaysia are Organic Chemistry/Polymer Science (3615 citations), Environment/Ecology (2847 citations), Agricultural Chemistry (2698 citations) and Microbiology (2564 citations). In relation to citation impact, it is noteworthy that Malaysia was listed as a new entrant to ISI Thompson’s Essential Science Indicators (ESI) database which is considered the “cream of cream” of scientific data bases, in the field of immunology. Malaysia had the highest total citations in the field of Immunology, in
December 2002. (Note: To gain entry into the ESI ranking, a citation threshold or criteria is applied to each field. For scientists and institutions, the criterion for selection is if they are in the top 1% by total citations in a given field, and for countries and journals, they are selected only if in the top 50%).
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Figure 8.15 shows the comparative citation impact of the top ten fields of research for four Asian countries namely, Taiwan, Thailand, Philippines and Malaysia. On comparison, the four countries have a differing top field of research although there may be some common fields within their top ten fields. Taiwan received the highest number of citations among the four selected Asian countries, followed by Thailand, Philippines and Malaysia. The top field of research in Taiwan was Applied Physics/Material Science, in Thailand it was Medical Research. In Philippines it was Plant Sciences whilst in Malaysia it was the field of Organic Chemistry.
In conclusion it may be said that the higher productivity in the medical and life sciences publications in Malaysia could be linked to the greater investment and funding geared toward national policies which may well be related to political will (e.g. war against cancer), scientific developments (e.g. revolutionary findings in molecular biology) and socio-economic needs (e.g. aging society, spread of diseases such as SARs, JE etc.). Malaysia’s contribution in these fields when compared to the world was, however insignificant when compared to US, UK and its more developed Asian counterparts. Among the Asian countries, Japan contributed the most to the world output. Malaysia’s contribution to the world was more significant in the field of agricultural sciences, particularly agricultural chemistry, although the amount of her contribution was still a very modest 0.51% of the world output. Malaysia has still a long way to go in the S&T fields in terms of publication output.
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