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Scientometrics (2011) 89:107–117 DOI 10.1007/s11192-011-0446-2 Scientific output and its relationship to knowledge economy: an analysis of ASEAN countries Tuan V Nguyen • Ly T Pham Received: 21 January 2011 / Published online: July 2011 Ó Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary 2011 Abstract This article seeks to examine the relationship between scientific output and knowledge economy index in 10 South East Asian countries (ASEAN) Using bibliometric data of the Institute of Scientific Information, we analyzed the number of scientific articles published in international peer-reviewed journals between 1991 and 2010 for Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines, and Singapore During the 20-year period, scientists from the ASEAN countries have published 165,020 original articles in ISI indexed journals, which represents *0.5% of the world scientific output Singapore led the region with the highest number of publications (accounting for 45% of the countries’ total publications), followed by Thailand (21%), Malaysia (16%), Vietnam (6%), Indonesia and the Philippines (5% each) The number of scientific articles from those countries has increased by 13% per year, with the rate of increase being highest in Thailand and Malaysia, and lowest in Indonesia and the Philippines At the country level, the correlation between knowledge economy index and scientific output was 0.94 Based on the relationship between scientific output and knowledge economy, we identified clusters of countries: Singapore as the first group; Thailand and Malaysia in the second group; Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines in the third group; and Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Brunei in the fourth group These data suggested that there was a strong relationship between scientific research and the degree of ‘‘knowledgization’’ of economy Keywords Scientific publication Á Bibliometric analysis Á Knowledge economy Á ASEAN T V Nguyen School of Public Health and Community Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia T V Nguyen (&) Garvan Institute of Medical Research, 384 Victoria Street, Sydney, NSW 2010, Australia e-mail: tuan.nguyen@unsw.edu.au T V Nguyen Á L T Pham Center for Human Resource Development, Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 123 108 T V Nguyen, L T Pham Introduction ASEAN countries collectively represent one of the most dynamic economies in the world With a population of *600 million people (i.e., 9% of the world population), and a combined GDP of $1.8 trillion, the ASEAN economy is ranked as the 9th largest economy in the world and the 3rd largest in Asia The region has experienced a remarkably continuous economic growth in recent years, with average rate of growth being to 6% per year during the past 20 years In recent years, the ASEAN countries have increased investment in science and technology with the view of achieving an economy driven by knowledge The concept of knowledge-based economy or knowledge driven economy has emerged as a new theoretical framework for assessing the development of a nation In its simplest words, knowledge-based economy is defined as an economy where ‘‘the role of knowledge (as compared with natural resources, physical capital and low skill labour has taken on greater importance’’ (OECD 1996) In a knowledge driven economy, economic development is related to technological competitiveness, which is in turn driven by science and scientific research Thus, in a knowledge-based economy, scientific research plays an important role in economic growth An important output of scientific research is the quantity of scientific publications in peer-reviewed academic journals Although there are more than 100,000 journals in the world, only the journals indexed by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) and SCOPUS are internationally widely recognized and accepted by the scientific community The ISI database covered around 10–12% of all peer-reviewed journals (Monastersky 2005) Indeed, the number of articles published by ISI journals represent an important measure of scientific activity and even scientific innovation of a country (King 2004) Therefore, scientific publication is also considered a component of knowledge-based economy construct However, to date, there have been no studies examining the scientific publication outputs and its relationship to knowledge economy indicators for ASEAN countries Although recent studies have attempted to analyze scientific publication from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and India (Mahbuba and Rousseau 2010), Thailand (Svasti and Asavisanu 2006) and Vietnam (Hien 2010), no studies have been done to examine the scientific output from all ASEAN countries We hypothesize that there is a correlation between scientific output and knowledge economy index across countries Specifically, we postulate that countries with higher index of knowledge economy have greater number of scientific publications in ISI journals This study was designed to test the hypothesis by (a) analyzing scientific output, and (b) examining the relationship between scientific output and knowledge based economy index across major ASEAN countries Materials and methods Sources of data ASEAN is a group of 10 countries, with different levels of economic and social development ASEAN countries collectively represent a major economic force in Asia as well as in the world The countries have also been in rapid economic transition, which are ideal for examining the relationship between scientific output and knowledge based economy 123 Scientific output and knowledge economy 109 The data used in this article were abstracted and synthesized from ISI’s online citation index, Web of Science (WoS) To retrieve the number of publications, we used the SCIExpanded, SSCI, A&HCI, CPCI-S, CPCI-SSA, CCR-Expanded, and IC databases within the ISI system The ISI databases contains approximately 8,700 journals, covering all fields of scientific research We used broad searches in the WoS address and country fields, and limited the search between 1991 and 2010 We used the tag ‘‘CU =’’ for countries (Vietnam or Viet Nam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines or the Philippines, and Singapore) and the delineations of years provided by the database We considered only ‘‘original articles’’ published in English We subsequently refined the results by research field using the Analyze Results feature in the WoS In each country, top 10 research fields were identified for 1991–2000 and 2001–2010 periods, and then the fields were merged from all countries, so that a between-countries comparison could be carried out Knowledge Economy Index (KEI) was extracted from the World Bank 2009 report which is available online at http://go.worldbank.org/SDDP3I1T40 (dated of access: 12 December 2010) KEI is a metric developed by the World Bank to assess a country’s performance in the adoption and diffusion of knowledge The index is a weighed average score of indices relating to economic institution and incentive, education, innovation, and information and communication technology KEI or each of the constituent indices has normalized values ranging from to 10, with higher values representing greater performance The methodology and derivation of KEI has been described previously (Chen and Dahlman 2005) which can also be found from the above website Data analysis The number of scientific publications were stratified into 10-year periods: 1991–2000 and 2001 and 2010 The stratification was done to facilitate an examination of growth in scientific research activities between the two periods In addition, we also classified scientific articles by scientific field and by country The correlation between scientific publication and KEI was analyzed by the linear regression model, with appropriate transformation to achieve normality of data All analyses were performed with the R Statistical Environment Team (2007) Results Scientific output During the period 1991–2010, the ten ASEAN countries published 165,020 original articles in ISI indexed journals This number represents 0.5% of total world scientific publications Singapore led the region with the highest number of publications, accounting for 45% of the countries’ total publications The next group consisted of Thailand and Malaysia, whose scientific publications accounted for 21 and 16%, respectively, of total publications The third group included Vietnam (6.5%), Indonesia (5%) and the Philippines (4.6%) The last group consisted of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Brunei, where the 10-year scientific publications accounted for 1.6% of total ASEAN publications There was a steady increase in the number of publications during the period of 1991 and 2010 in all countries (Fig 1) On average, the rate of increase was 13% per year, and this rate of increase was largely driven by Singapore (which recorded a 13%/year increase), Thailand (15%/year), and Malaysia (14%) Vietnam has also recorded a 13%/year increase 123 110 T V Nguyen, L T Pham Fig Number of scientific publications during the period of 1991–2010 from major Southeast Asian countries during the same period However, Indonesia and the Philippines had the lowest rate of increase (8%/year) When the 20-year period was broken down into two periods of 1991–2000 and 2001–2010, it was found that the total number of publications from the 10 countries in 2001–2010 was increased by 3.3-fold compared to that in 1991–2000 period (Table 1) However, the rate of growth varied remarkably between countries, with the highest rate being observed in Cambodia The number of publications from Thailand in 2001–2010 increased by 4.2 times compared with the previous 10-year period The high rate of growth was also seen in Malaysia (3.9 times), Vietnam (3.4 times), and Singapore (3.1 times) while lower rates were observed in Indonesia (2.2 times) and the Philippines (1.9 times) Research areas Using the research area classification of ISI, we grouped the ASEAN publications into 12 broad groups: agriculture, basic science, biomedical sciences, chemistry, economics, engineering, environmental science, material sciences, mathematics, physics, public health, and social sciences The actual number of publications and the percentage composition of each broad group from 1991 to 2010 are shown in Fig In Singapore, research output in engineering and biomedical science were ranked among the top research fields A similar trend was also observed in the second group of countries (i.e., Thailand and Malaysia) where biomedical science and engineering research output together accounted for more than 70% of total scientific output In the third group (i.e., Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines), publications from biomedical science and agriculture had the largest share of research output Detailed analysis by scientific discipline (Fig 2) reveals further differences in research areas between the countries For instance, in Singapore, publications in the area of 123 Scientific output and knowledge economy Table Number of scientific publications (original articles) from Southeast Asian countries during 1991–2010 Country Vietnam 111 1991–2000 2001–2010 Rate of increase 2,398 8,220 3.43 Cambodia 97 880 9.07 Laos 41 375 9.15 6,673 28,148 4.22 189 546 2.89 Malaysia 5,366 21,203 3.95 Indonesia 2,638 5,784 2.19 210 345 1.64 2,630 4,956 1.88 Singapore 18,220 56,101 3.07 All ASEAN countries 38,462 126,558 3.29 Thailand Myanmar Brunei The Philippines Fig Distribution of scientific publications from ASEAN countries between 1991 and 2010 classified by broad research area The countries were grouped into clusters: a Singapore; b Thailand and Malaysia; c Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines; and d Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Brunei electronics and electrical engineering, applied physics, material science and newer science such as nanoscience ranked among the top research fields In Thailand, research in immunology, public health and tropical medicine, pharmacology and pharmacy, and food science comprised a high percentage of the country’s scientific output Vietnam’s leading 123 112 T V Nguyen, L T Pham research fields were pure and applied mathematics, theoretical and applied physics, public health and infectious diseases, which together accounted for more than 30% of the country’s scientific publications In Malaysia, research in crystallography, food science and technology, plant sciences, pharmacology and pharmacy were ranked among top research activities The Philippines and Indonesia had a strong publication record in agronomy, plant sciences, marine and fresh water biology, and fishery Quality of research In order to assess the quality of publication, we determined the number of original articles that had published between 2001 and 2005, and abstracted the number of citations between the period and 2010 The average citation and H index for each country are shown in Table There was a substantial variation between countries, with Singapore and Cambodia having the highest rate of citation (15.4 and 15.3 citations/article, respectively) However, when assessing quality in terms of H index, research in Singapore still had the higher impact (H index of 104), followed by Thailand (92); other countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines had comparable H index (between 57 and 66) With fewer number of publications, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Brunei had the lowest H index compared with other ASEAN countries Knowledge economy index Data for knowledge economy index (KEI), knowledge index (KI), innovation, and information and communication technology (ICT) are shown in Table Among the countries analyzed (there was no KEI data for Brunei), by any indicator, Singapore was ranked highest, followed by Malaysia and Thailand Other countries (e.g., Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines) clustered into a similar group with low KEI, KI and innovation index A linear relationship between the number of scientific publications and KEI or innovation index is observed (Fig 3), such that countries with higher KEI were correlated with higher number of publications The coefficient of correlation between the number of publications and KEI was 0.96, between the number of publications and innovation was 0.94 Based on the relationship between publications and KEI or KI, it can be grouped the 10 ASEAN countries into clusters: group included Singapore; group consisted of Table Number of citations to articles published between 2001 and 2005 Country Vietnam Number of citations Average rate of citation H index 2,683 29,714 11.1 59 Cambodia 160 2,455 15.3 25 Laos 112 1,548 13.8 20 8,796 120,936 13.8 92 Thailand Myanmar 122 1,825 15.0 22 Malaysia 5,464 49,716 9.1 66 Indonesia 2,199 26,728 12.2 57 142 1,461 10.3 18 1,940 25,458 13.1 58 21,995 338,654 15.4 104 Brunei The Philippines Singapore 123 Number of articles Scientific output and knowledge economy 113 Table Knowledge economy index and knowledge-related indices among 10 ASEAN countries Country (rank) KEI KI Economic incentive Innovation ICT Vietnam (100) 3.51 3.74 2.79 2.72 4.85 Cambodia 1.56 1.54 1.63 2.07 0.62 Laos 1.94 2.09 1.47 2.0 2.03 Thailand (63) 5.52 5.66 5.12 5.76 5.64 Myanmar 1.34 1.69 0.31 1.30 0.70 Malaysia (48) 6.07 6.06 6.11 6.82 7.14 Indonesia (103) 3.29 3.17 3.66 3.19 2.72 Brunei NA NA NA NA NA The Philippines (89) 4.12 4.03 4.37 3.80 3.60 Singapore (19) 8.44 8.03 9.68 9.58 9.22 KEI knowledge economy index, KI knowledge index, ICT information and communication technology Thailand and Malaysia; group comprised Vietnam, Indonesia, and Philippines; and group included Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar Discussion ASEAN as a group plays an important role in the world economy, due largely to its large population and a dynamic economy However, no bibliometric analysis of scientific research and its relationship to economy in ASEAN countries has been conducted The present study was designed to fill the gap by examining the relationship, and found that (a) overall, the ASEAN contribution to scientific knowledge, as measured by scientific output, is still modest given its population size, and (b) there was a strong relationship between scientific output and knowledge economy index among the ASEAN countries It’s increasingly recognized that Asia is rapidly merging a driving force in scientific research and development Since 2006, the scientific publication from China alone has put the country in the second place (after the United States) in terms of global share in scientific output Korea and India have also increased their gross domestic expenditure on research and development, and have produced impressive scientific outputs within 20 years (Leydesdorff and Zhou 2005) Although ASEAN countries as a group has a modest share in world scientific publication, the rate of increase of 15% per annum will shortly increase its global share Several explanations could be proposed to account for the large disparity between countries in terms of scientific output In ASEAN countries, public R&D expenditure plays a major role in shaping the scientific research landscape While Singapore invested heavily in science and technology (Arunachalam and Garg 1985), other countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia have much lower investment It’s perhaps therefore not surprising that the publication output from Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines is still modest compared with Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia Economic and social stability is one potential explanation While Vietnam had been at war with various powers for almost 100 years, other countries in the region had enjoyed a long period of economic stability Indeed, the scientific research in Vietnam has really taken off since 1990, when the policy of ‘‘renovation’’ was 123 114 T V Nguyen, L T Pham Fig Relationship between scientific publications and knowledge economy index (upper panel) and innovation index (lower panel) introduced after a long period of political isolation and economic crisis It’s thus perhaps not surprising to see that the scientific output from Vietnam has been modest during the first ten years (1991 to 2000), but then rapidly increased during the next decade Another reason for the modest share of ASEAN science in the global scientific output is the English language problem With the exception of Singapore and Philippines, many researchers in all other ASEAN countries are not familiar with the English language, and as a result, most of their work are published in domestic journals which are not indexed by ISI This means that only a small proportion of articles from ASEAN researchers are 123 Scientific output and knowledge economy 115 actually present in ISI journals Indeed, it has been estimated that only 10% of Chinese medical articles are published in journals that are included in the PubMed system (Mely et al 1998) Moreover, ASEAN authors, just like non-native English authors, face considerable difficulty in getting their work published in English academic journals (Stolerman and Stenius 2008; Vasconcelos et al 2008), due to ‘‘editorial racism’’ and/or bias against their work (Tyrer 2005) All of these factors contribute to the poor representation of ASEAN science in ISI indexed journals According to these results, we could identify some archetypes of knowledge production in ASEAN countries While Vietnam had a strong publication record in mathematics and physics (Hien 2010), Singapore had considerable strength in engineering and biotechnology, Thailand has good publication record in food technology, pharmacology and pharmacy, Malaysia in crystallography and engineering, Indonesia in ecology and environmental science, and the Philippines in agriculture and plant sciences These results are also consistent with a previous bibliometric analysis of Thailand scientific output (Svasti and Asavisanu 2006) These archetypes together represent a rather diversified and comprehensive contribution of ASEAN science to the world’s scientific knowledge The 10 ASEAN countries clustered into groups based on the quantity and quality of publication Singapore clearly stood out as the country with the highest output in the region, followed by Thailand and Malaysia as the second bloc; Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines as one bloc with medium number of publication record; and finally Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Brunei as one bloc with the lowest scientific output However, it is noted that Vietnam is rapidly transiting into the second bloc, with a considerable growth in recent years Further analysis of research areas revealed some further clusters, with economically advanced countries had better research output in engineering and high technology and biotechnology (Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia), while less economically developed countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, and the Philippines) had good research record in ‘‘low tech’’ fields such as public health, and in the case of Vietnam, theoretical physics and mathematics Due to poor infrastructure in scientific research, most research projects in Vietnam focused on theoretical areas, such as pure mathematics and theoretical physics Singapore has invested heavily in R&D, with R&D expenditure accounted for 1.9 to 2.5% of GDP between 2000 and 2007, and has built a close link between academic research and industry (Arunachalam and Garg 1985) As a result, Singapore research output was largely from applied research and technology such as engineering and nanotechnology This trend is also consistent with results of a recent analysis which suggested that less economically developed countries tended to focus on basic research areas that requires minimal scientific equipments and modern technology (Okubo et al 1998; Osareh and Wilson 1997) We found a strong and consistent correlation between the scientific output and knowledge economy and innovation indices This correlation has a number of implications for scientific development in ASEAN countries First, if we accept the assumption that technology is a result of scientific research, and technology is the driving force in a knowledge-based economy (Ramirez and Meyer 2000), then the present results suggest that ASEAN governments should increase their GDP expenditure on scientific research in the future At present, with the exception of Singapore, all other ASEAN countries have invested less than 1% of GDP on scientific research and development It should be noted that in 2008 Korea had allocated 3.4% of its GDP was spent on research and development Second, with the exception of Vietnam, most scientific research in ASEAN is carried out in major universities by lecturers and professors, who consider research a secondary priority (after teaching) (Waworuntu and Holsinger 1989) It’s therefore not surprising to observe 123 116 T V Nguyen, L T Pham that the scientific productivity (as evidenced by the number of publications) of ASEAN academics is relatively low (Waworuntu and Holsinger 1989) Therefore, one way to increase the scientific output from these countries is for university management to initiate new policies, including promotion policy, that encourage lecturers and professors publish their work in international peer-reviewed journals Third, these results also have implication for the aspiration of ASEAN universities to become world class (or listed in the top 200 world leading universities) A very important component of the university ranking is the number and quality of scientific publications The present analysis suggests that most ASEAN universities have still a long way from becoming a world class university, because their publication record is low compared with Western universities (Hien 2010) The present results must be considered within certain strengths and potential weaknesses First, this is the first comparative analysis of scientific outputs from ASEAN countries that provided a comprehensive indicator of scientific research activities in the region between 1991 and 2010 Second, we used the Thomson’s ISI databases which are considered comprehensive and ‘‘gold standard’’ for assessing scientific output of a country However, because of the nature of the data, it is not possible to make any inference on the causal relationship between the scientific output and knowledge economy Moreover, the correlation that we reported can only be seen as an ecologic correlation, which does not again reflect a true cause-and-effect relationship Since the analysis was primarily based on data from countries (because KEI data for Brunei was not available), the sample size is limited, and the estimate of correlation coefficient might be unstable It should be noted that the duration of scientific output in this analysis was based on the years of publication archived in the ISI database, not necessarily the actual years of publication Moreover, the growth in the number of publications over the years could partly be due to the increase in the number of journals indexed by ISI (Larsen and von Ins 2010) In this analysis, we did not examine the issue of international collaboration, and as a result, we could not accurately attribute the publication to a certain country Indeed, a large amount of scientific research in economically less developed ASEAN countries, particularly in biomedical science, were conducted in collaboration with or assistance from Western colleagues We used the H index (Hirsch 2005) and rate of citations as measured of quality, but it is arguable that the two measures not capture adequately the concept of quality Indeed, countries with higher number of publications are expected to have higher H index; therefore, the index may not be an ideal and independent measure of scientific quality of a country Moreover, most articles have high citation were actually collaborative work which involved multiple scientists around the world; therefore, the use of citation may not necessarily indicate the scientific quality of a country However, recent analyses in China and Korea seemed to suggest that the citation rate (an indicator of quality) for Asian articles was lower than articles authored by Western scientists In summary, the contribution of ASEAN countries to world scientific knowledge is still modest, although there is a rapid growth in scientific research activities in this part of the world during the past 10 years There was a positive and strong linear relationship between scientific output and knowledge economy indices, which characterized the 10 countries into groups according to their thematic profile These data reinforce the concept that scientific research is an important—if not the most important—component of a country’s knowledge based economy Acknowledgments We gratefully acknowledge the expert assistance of Dr Nguyen D Nguyen, who advised on a standardized procedure for extracting 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