Publications

In the last two decades, hand-in-hand with strong economic growth, Southeast Asia has experienced a strengthened academic community as well as an increase in public and private research and development. But, because the level of research activity and maturity of the research environment in Southeast Asian countries is varied and has been changing rapidly in recent years, public perceptions of the amount and relevance of the research output can often be inaccurate. This gives particular emphasis to the need for data to support decisions concerning collaborative research programmes.

Two relevant recent developments in the area of science and technology (S&T) and related policy-making motivate this article: First, bibliometric data on a specific research area’s performance becomes an increasingly relevant source for S&T policy-making and evaluation. This trend is embedded in wider discussions on evidence-based policy-making. Secondly, the scientific output of Southeast Asian countries is rising, as is the number of international research collaborations with the second area of our interest: Europe. Against this background, we employ basic bibliometric methodology in order to draw a picture of Southeast Asian research strengths as well the amount and focus of S&T cooperation between the countries in Southeast Asia and the European Union. The results can prove useful for an interested public as well as for the scientific community and science, technology and innovation policy-making.

We propose a new methodology to discover the relationship between authors and research domains. The methodology utilizes the classic author-topic model to find the probabilistic relationships among authors, topics and papers. A distance matrix is used to find authors close to the authors obtained from the classic author-topic model for a given topic. In addition, the relationship of selected authors is examined with a co-authorship network model. We compare the performance of our methodology with that of the classic author-topic model. The experimental results on the DBLP database show that the proposed methodology discovers more precise relationships between authors and research domains than does the classic author-topic model, with a 36% increase in performance.

This paper discovers the research themes of institutes’ research work using analysis of scientific literature. The proposed methodology creates research profiles of the institutes  y aggregating citations of highly cited works and then clusters the documents that cite those works to determine the impact, in that area of the research. Research themes are identified by clustering author defied keywords. The approach is demonstrated on several Japanese institutes in the field of Nanotechnology. The analytical techniques discussed in this paper can discover niche focus of institutes’ research. This information can be very useful for the research administrators, funding agencies, and institutes leaders to understand the research structure of institutes in order to support resource allocation decisions.

Independent intellectual creative capacity developed through research is essential in enabling countries to take control of exploring, planning, and implementing their own most appropriate sustainable development paths. Given the scarce financial resources in many countries, areas of research focus must be carefully chose so as to achieve maximum value from investment at a level that will have noticeable positive impact upon society. In pursuit of its core mission of providing countries and other stakeholders with the tools they need to better assess and develop their own research capacity, making the most of scarce resources, United Nations University International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST) has launched programs to support this. Among these programs, a key project is the Global Research Benchmarking System (GRBS) which provides objective data and analyses to benchmark research performance in traditional disciplinary subject areas and in interdisciplinary areas for the purpose of strengthening the quality and impact of research. This paper presents case studies to illustrate the use of GRBS. The case studies show that the GRBS can help the universities to identify niche areas in which they can excel, to make more rational strategic resource allocation decisions, and to publicize program strengths. Finally the paper discusses that how a university can improve its position among its peers by using the research quality and output indicators proposed by the GRBS.

We introduce a new quantitative measure of international scholarly impact of countries by using bibliometric techniques based on publication and citation data. We present a case study to illustrate the use of our proposed measure in the subject area Energy during 1996 to 2009. We also present geographical maps to visualize knowledge flows among countries. Finally, using correlation analysis between publication output and international scholarly impact, we study the explanatory power of the applied measure.