Research productivity and quality of higher education institutions in Vietnam: An analysis from the integrated database of web of science and scopus

Abstract

This study develops intergration of the WoS and Scopus articles of Vietnamese authors into the Vietnam Citation Gateway system of Vietnam National University Hanoi; sets up a merging tool to filter the duplication for these two databases and establishes their bibliometric and citation index. Based on this integrated database, the reality of international publications of Vietnam and Vietnamese universities in the period of 2014-2018 was analyzed, benchmarked and discussed. For the first time, a completed data on WoS & Scopus publications has been established. Accordingly, in 2018, the annual productivity of international publications in Vietnam has almost reached the number of 10,000 articles, of which higher education institutions contribute up to 70%. The rate of increase in WoS & Scopus articles has strongly increased every year (34.7% for the Vietnam, in general, and 41.6% for higher education institutions, in particular). The growth of research productivity was also described for young universities such as Ton Duc Thang University and Duy Tan University. In terms of research quality, Vietnam has an average citation index of 9.2, which is comparable to that of Asian higher education institutions. This analysis allows classifying research oriented universities and high impact research fields for Vietnam. Specially, this work also emphasizes the relation between the university autonomy and the improvement of research productivity and quality