Vietnam has too few international scientific publications

Scientific articles in international journals are considered by the United Nations as a criterion for evaluating a country's creative capacity

United Nations World Investment Report 2005

According to the annual report of the United Nations World Investment Report, announced on September 2005 (with the theme of 2005 Transnational Corporation and the Internationalization of R&D), that index of innovation index is evaluated for 117 countries. on the world.

Instead of the investment for R&D (input), the number of articles published in international scientific journals (output) becomes a basic component in this composite index. Vietnam from 93/117 in 1995 rose to the position of 82/117 in 2001, thanks to the achievement of educational development. However, Vietnam is still ranked among the poorest countries, after 2 groups of high and medium level countries in the world (including 78 countries).

So far, the article published in international journals has not been officially considered as an important criterion to strive for in scientific management in our country.

However, with the above view in the United Nations report, it is also necessary to consider our achievements on the international playing field in science over the past ten years, thereby drawing lessons to improve. position in the future.

In the spirit of the above report, the following only discusses the original scientific articles (articles) appearing in 5.969 journals available in the ISI (Institute of Scientific Information) Web of Science database. in Philadelphia, USA, including hundreds of natural sciences, technology, society, humanities and art studies. While it may not be fully complete, it is a complete picture of a modern science.

In addition to the article, in the ISI database, there are many other genres such as letter, book review, meeting abstract ., but the following are only interested in articles, because these are the latest research achievements of The publisher has a reputation for publication and is criticized by the most prestigious scientists in each field.

There are some publishers in Taiwan, China, India, and South Korea. But there seems to be no magazine published in Vietnam that gets into this database, even English language journals.

There are too few international articles with Vietnamese addresses

Currently, an estimated 800,000 articles in 21 S&T branches are annually published in nearly 6,000 international journals, which ISI gathers in its database with the number of citations for each article. At the top is the United States, about 300,000 (because the number is so large that it cannot be statistically accurate), then to Japan (75,000), and advanced countries with long-standing science like Germany (66,000), England ( 59,000), France (47,000) or as crowded as China (57,000).

In the past ten years (1995-2004), the number of scientific articles with Vietnamese addresses appearing in international journals increased from 204 in 1995 to 456 in 2004, and there were 3,236 articles. But of these, more than 2,400 articles (more than three quarters) are from Vietnamese authors who share the same name with foreigners, only nearly 800 are "pure Vietnamese", which are done primarily by internal resources. This small number of people keeps trampling around the number of 80 articles per year during the past time (Figure 1).

Two theoretical and mathematical disciplines account for 54% of the articles on internal resources, not to mention the mathematical works present in the computer and mechanical majors. The majority of authors worked at the Institute of Mathematics (300 articles) and the Center for Theoretical Physics (131 articles), belonging to the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology. There are 124 articles on mathematics and 31 articles on theoretical physics taking addresses from universities, especially from lesser-known schools in Quy Nhon, Thai Nguyen, etc. These figures are very impressive, but still not commensurate with the force of teachers is very crowded in our country.

The average number of citations for articles using internal resources in the last ten years was 1.7, while articles by foreign cooperation amounted to 7.5. Half of the articles using internal resources are not cited by anyone

Less than half of the remaining belong to the experimental industry, applications and technologies that require equipment, facilities and many participants.

Unlike the theoretical work, an experimental scientific work conducted in Vietnam often encounters many objective difficulties, so it is a great success to intervene in international magazines. Therefore, it is easy to understand why we have more theoretical articles than experiments. However, our picture is different from the surrounding countries, where mathematics and theoretical physics are always at the bottom of the table, and on the top of the table are often empirical sciences, applications and technologies that have a direct impact on their life and key economic sectors.

There has been no sign of a breakthrough in scientific budget increase since 2000

While the number of articles by foreign cooperation increased exponentially, doubling after 5.5 years, the work due to internal forces almost trampled around around 80 annually. In particular, it is not clear that the breakthrough of investment in science and technology has increased to 2% of the state budget since 2000 (scientists should also ask their own questions in this regard). .

The figures above speak for themselves on the research and development (R&D) activities in our country. Managers will certainly draw the right conclusions in addition to the arguments of upcoming policies on innovating S&T management mechanisms.

Who are the writers?

Vietnam currently has nearly 20 scientists, each of whom has published more than 10 projects in ten years (not including articles jointly named with foreigners and publications of international conferences).

One-third of those "writers" were cited quite a lot by their peers, averaging 3 to 12 times each of their projects. They are the culminating peaks of Vietnamese science, but also only on the "reach" category in the world. Seeing the information on Table 1 will make many people surprised because few people mention them.

Pham Duy Hien