DSpace at VNU: Scientific output and its relationship to knowledge economy: an analysis of ASEAN countries

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: 1 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 4 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:
T. V. Nguyen Á L. T. Pham
Center for Human Resource Development, Vietnam National University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

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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 5 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.

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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 (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 4 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 0 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 2 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

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T. V. Nguyen, L. T. Pham

Fig. 1 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. 2. 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

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Table 1 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. 2 Distribution of scientific publications from ASEAN countries between 1991 and 2010 classified by
broad research area. The countries were grouped into 4 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

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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 2. 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 3. Among the 9 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 4 clusters: group 1 included Singapore; group 2 consisted of

Table 2 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

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Number
of articles


Scientific output and knowledge economy

113

Table 3 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 3 comprised Vietnam, Indonesia, and Philippines; and group
4 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

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T. V. Nguyen, L. T. Pham

Fig. 3 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

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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 4 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

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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 9 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 do 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 4 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 data from ISI database. The present work was done while
the first author was visiting the Vietnam National University at Ho Chi Minh City. Professor Tuan V.

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Nguyen is supported by a Senior Research Fellowship from the Australian National Health and Medical
Research Council.

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