Research Productivity and Quality of Higher Education Institutions in Vietnam: An Analysis Based on the Integrated Database of Web of Science and Scopus

Abstract

This study intergrates the WoS and Scopus articles by Vietnamese authors into the Vietnam Citation Gateway system of Vietnam National University, Hanoi (VNU), 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. Accordingly, in 2018, the annual productivity of international publications in Vietnam reached 10,000 articles, nearly 70% of those were contributed by higher education institutions. This shows a stong yearly increase in Vienam’s WoS & Scopus articles (of 34.7% for Vietnam in general and 41.6% for higher education institutions in particular). In terms of research quality, Vietnam has an average citation index of 9.2, which is comparable to that of Asian higher education institutions. Notably, the study clearly shows the correlation between the university autonomy and the improvement of research productivity and quality.