A Scientometric Study on Depression among University Students in East Asia: Research and System Insufficiencies?

Abstract

Given that mental health issues are acute in Asian countries, particularly Japan and Korea, and university students are more vulnerable to depression than the general population, this study aims to examine the landscapes of scientific research regarding depressive disorders among university students and evaluate the effectiveness of international collaboration and funding provision on the scientific impact in Korea, Japan, and China. Based on articles retrieved from the Web of Science database during the period 1992-2018, we found that the number of scientific publications, international collaborations, and allocated funds regarding depressive disorder among university students in China (97 articles, 43 international collaborations, and 52 funds provided, respectively) overwhelmingly surpassed the case of Korea (37 articles, 12 international collaborations, and 15 funds provided, respectively) and Japan (24 articles, 5 international collaborations, and 6 funds provided, respectively). The differences in collaboration patterns (p-value < 0.05) and the proportion of allocated funds (p-value < 0.05) among Korea, Japan, and China were also noted using Fisher's exact test. Based on the Poisson regression analysis, China's associations of scientific impact with international collaboration (β = −0.322, p-value < 0.01) and funding provision (β = −0.397, p-value < 0.01) are negative, while associations of the scientific impact and scientific quality with funding provision and international collaboration were statistically insignificant. These findings hint that Korea and Japan lacked scientific output, diversity in research targets, international collaboration, and funding provision, compared to China, but the quality of either China's internationally collaborated or funded articles was contentious. As a result, policymakers in Korea and Japan are suggested to raise the importance of mental health problems in their future policy planning and resource distribution. Moreover, it would be advisable to establish a rigorous system of evaluation for the quality of internationally collaborated and funded studies in order to increase scientific impact and maintain public trust, especially in China.

On the 50-Year Research Landscape of Entrepreneurial Finance: A Sign of Western Ideological Homogeneity?

“…In this study, we only use data from WoS database and do not consider articles not written in English and various forms of publication (etc. books, book sections, and proceeding papers), so there is a possibility of production bias, as some countries usually publish social science studies in the form of books, write a research paper in their own language, and publish in a local database, such as Japan (Nguyen et al 2020). Last but not least, the findings in this study can only show the dominance of Western countries in terms of scientific production and international collaboration within the discipline, but not really an ideological homogeneity.…”

On the social and conceptual structure of the 50-year research landscape in entrepreneurial finance

“…Also, in this study, we only use data from the WoS database and do not consider articles not written in English as well as other various forms of publication (e.g., books, book sections, and proceeding papers), so there is a possibility of production bias. The reason is that some countries usually publish social science studies in the form of books, use their language to write research papers, and publish in a local database, such as Japan (Nguyen et al 2020 ).…”

A bibliometric review on development economics research in Vietnam from 2008 to 2020

“…In SSH, the bibliometric data were mainly used to look at the comprehensive picture of the field. Larger datasets from the Web of Science or Scopus are popular for Vietnamese researchers to investigate certain topics such as HIV research (Tran et al 2019a ), innovation research (Le et al 2019 ), education (Hallinger and Nguyen 2020 ), depression among university students in East Asia (Nguyen et al 2020b ), social entrepreneurship (Phan et al 2020 ), and non-biomedical modalities (Nguyen 2019 ). However, no studies have examined the field of development economics.…”