Researchers of Duy Tan University announced the results of top fifty of Vietnamese universities with best international publications in 2019 based on an analysis of data extracted from the Scopus scientific database last updated on February 1, 2020. According to their study, Thuyloi University ranked 18 nationally regarding the most international publication in 2019.
In 2019, the total number of publications with Vietnamese address counted up to 12,307 of different types. Among these, publications from Vietnamese universities take up 90.3% or 11,118 publications. The remaining number comes from hospitals, independent research organizations, businesses, colleges, and a few high schools.
Vietnamese publications in the Scopus database in 2019 come in eleven types: (1) article or article in press; (2) conference paper; (3) letter; (4) review; (5) book; (6) book chapter; (7) data paper; (8) note; (9) editorial; (10) erratum; and (11) short survey.
Analysis of output
Table 1: Top 50 of Vietnamese universities with most international publications in 2019
From data above, Thuyloi University is ranked 18 in top 50 Vietnamese universities with the most international publication in 2019.
Analysis of citations
Up to the last time the data was updated, the total number of citations to all publications in 2019 from Vietnam was 16,211. For the fifty universities mentioned above, the total number of citations to all their publications was 14,357, or 88.6% of the total. Note that the total number of citations for these fifty universities is not the total sum of the numbers for each of them, but that it is counted as the total number of citations to publications with at least one of these fifty universities on them.
Table 2: Total number of citations to 2019 publications of the fifty Vietnamese universities with highest output. “0” means the university had publications, but that these have not yet received citations. “--” signals a lack of publications from this university
TLU ranked 23 nationally regarding the most citations to all publications in 2019.
Analysis of publication quality
An indicator often used when evaluating journal quality is the Impact Factor (IF), provided by Clarivate’s Web of Science scientific database. However, the distribution of IFs is very different between different fields. This is why the IF cannot really be used to evaluate journal quality between different fields, and even less so to evaluate publication quality between different universities, especially between multidisciplinary and specialized schools.
Instead, one should use the journal ranking by field (per quartile or Q). This ranking is currently in use at scientific funding agencies (such as NAFOSTED), and universities use it to evaluate relative publication quality. Large scientific databases like Web of Science or Scopus provide rankings for the journals they index. Web of Science, for example, ranks journals in the same field from high to low based on their IF and then divides them into four groups of identical size. The group of journals with 25% highest IFs are called Q1, the next 25% is Q2, then comes Q3, and finally Q4. The Q journal ranking used by Scopus is similar. For this analysis, we used the Q ranking provided by Scopus (Scimago Lab).
Table 3: Analysis of journal ranking for the publications of each university