Education and Globalization in Southeast Asia Issues and Challenges

102 Mukherjee, Singh, Fernandez-Chung and Marimuthu

it is evident that Malaysian universities have a long way to go in the
ranking stakes. Information on ranking performance by academic field
is useful for institutional planners, where indicators on relative strengths
and weaknesses can be used for further analysis within HEIs as well as
government and industry. In Engineering and Technology, for example,
USM moved up from 222nd in 2012 to 169th in 2013 while UM fell from
165th to 213th place.^6 UM leads the pack with 12,008 papers published
between January 2010 and August 2014, 34,652 citations with an average
2.89 citations per paper (Table 4.4). Leading the region are NUS with
6.51 citations per paper and University of Tokyo (6.40), showing a gap in
performance between them and Malaysian universities.
A useful proxy measure of an institution’s technological inventions
which have potential economic value may be derived from levels of
patenting, particularly in terms of the number of patents issued by the U.S.
Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). They also indicate technological
readiness for moving into a knowledge economy. Between January 2010
and August 2014, USPTO issued five U.S. patents to UM, one each to
Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) and Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
(UTM), and none to UKM and Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). When
compared with NUS’s twenty-three patents issued over the same period of

TABLE 4.4

Publication and Citation Statistics of Selected Malaysian Universities and

Other Leading Asian Universities, January 2010 – August 2014

University Country Number of
Papers

Number of

Citations

Number of

Citations

per Paper

Universiti Malaya Malaysia 12,008 2 34,652 2.89
Universiti Sains Malaysia Malaysia 2 8,984 2 25,709 2.86
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia Malaysia 2 7,058 2 13,546 1.92
Universiti Putra Malaysia Malaysia 2 7,927 2 19,162 2.42
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia Malaysia 2 5,245 2 10,585 2.02
National University of Singapore Singapore 29,305 190,890 6.51
Hong Kong University Hong Kong 39,944 204,982 5.13
Seoul National University South Korea 36,925 172,192 4.66
Tsinghua University China 29,756 145,440 4.89
University of Tokyo Japan 43,150 276,153 6.40

Source: Web of Science Core Collections (all available indices) via Thomson Reuters Web of Science.