A spike in the scientific output on social sciences in Vietnam for recent three years: Evidence from bibliometric analysis in Scopus database (2000–2019)

Abstract

Bibliometric analysis of 3105 publications retrieved from the Scopus database was conducted to evaluate bibliographic content of scientific output on social sciences in Vietnam, for the 2000–2019 period. Our main findings show that the number of publications on social sciences from Vietnam has increased significantly over the last two decades, and there was a spike in the scientific output for the recent three years when the number of publications accounted for 53.76% of the collection. The most productive authors came from a few public research institutes with strong resources as the top 10 institutions participated in 44.22% of the collection. Vietnamese scholars tend not to submit their works to high-ranking journals since five Q1 journals in the top 10 publishing journals published only 6.17% of the collection. For international collaboration, Australia and the United States ranked first and second based on the number of publications and citations. Other countries in top 10 mostly located in Europe and Asia. Research topics were diverse focusing on gender, poverty, HIV, higher education and sustainable development. We suggest that supporting policies and funding need to be provided to help Vietnamese scholars improve their works, and to boost their scientific production in the future.

Evolution of Interdisciplinary Approaches Among Research-Oriented Universities in Vietnam Toward a Modern Industrial Economy: Exploratory Study

“…Similar to those in previous analyses, findings in this study showed that despite a gradual decline in recent years, the contribution of international collaborations to the total number of publications is huge (through the position of the first author, corresponding authors, and fundings) [ 7 , 22 , 23 ]. This is especially true in empirical research fields, which require great investment in equipment and technology as well as technology transfer activities from countries with more advanced science.…”

“…In addition, the cooperation network between strong research centers and local research units should be strongly encouraged to improve the scientific productivity and scientific research capacity of research institutions in these less developed regions. Similar to those in previous analyses, findings in this study showed that despite a gradual decline in recent years, the contribution of international collaborations to the total number of publications is huge (through the position of the first author, corresponding authors, and fundings) [7,22,23]. This is especially true in empirical research fields, which require great investment in equipment and technology as well as technology transfer activities from countries with more advanced science.…”

“…In addition, in some research-oriented universities, policies on money rewards of universities and research institutes for scientific papers in international journals increased the motivation and research performance of Vietnamese researchers. However, despite the significant progress, the knowledge contribution of Vietnamese scholars is still modest compared to those in other countries even in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations region, such as Malaysia (24,423 documents in 2020), Thailand (16,697 documents in 2020), or Singapore (23,225 documents in 2020), according to statistics of the Web of Science database [19]. Furthermore, the number of scientific publications as of December 14, 2021 (12,783 publications) was almost equal to that in 2020, showing that science and technology activities in Vietnam are slowing down [19].…”

“…However, currently, many private universities have announced the development of strong research groups with large investments. This is a model that has proven effective in other countries around the world [21][22][23][24]. Therefore, the launch of private universities in the science and technology map of Vietnam is expected to be more common in the coming period.…”

Research on Industry 4.0 and on key related technologies in Vietnam: A bibliometric analysis using Scopus

“…This method was then extended by Heck and Bremser (Heck & Bremser, 1986), by adding author and institute analyses. This type of bibliometric analysis has been widely used to analyse scientific evolution of various research fields at global and local scales such as, in medicine (Tran et al, 2018; Tran, Vu, et al, 2019), remote sensing (Pham‐Duc, Nguyen, et al, 2020; Zhang et al, 2017), higher education (Hallinger & Chatpinyakoop, 2019), energy research (Chen et al, 2016), tsunami research (Chiu & Ho, 2007), sustainable tourism (Della Corte et al, 2019), management and organization (Zupic & Čater, 2015), terahertz research (Li et al, 2020), social sciences (Pham‐Duc, Tran, et al, 2020) or event‐based control (Aranda‐Escolastico et al, 2020). Bibliometric analysis of Industry 4.0 has been studied in several papers, but mostly focused on evaluation the global research trend (Cobo et al, 2018; Janik & Ryszko, 2018; Kipper et al, 2020; Mariani & Borghi, 2019; Muhuri et al, 2019).…”