Research in Malaysia - again

Given that SPM results are out, it is not surprising that Malaysian universities and colleges are putting up advertisements to recruit students.  Most of the universities and colleges in Malaysia claimed that they are world class.  This is hardly surprising as Malaysia's deputy prime minister believes that Malaysian education is indeed one of the best in the world, better than American, British universities.

One way to judge a university is probably through their publications.  So I randomly picked a private university in Malaysia which published its research work http://sunway.edu.my/university/research/publications . I guess the university will put up their research if they are proud of their research work.  So how do our so called one of the best university in Malaysia fare? in 2011, there are about 6 papers in the whole university.

They did much better in 2010, although I was surprise to find this publisher "LAP Lambert Academic Publishing". I mean their so called Professors don't even know that LAP Lambert Academic Publishing is a scam????? Come on, take a look http://chrisnf.blogspot.com/2009/06/academic-spam.html or http://www.writingnetwork.edu.au/content/email-lap-offering-publish-my-masters-thesis

Another interesting thing I find is that the whole publication in the university, is not even more than a single person in some universities in let's say Hong Kong or Singapore.  More importantly, look at the type of publications produced by people in these universities http://www.polyu.edu.hk/mm/mm_dev/content.php?id=1&content=area&aid=76 , yes, we are talking about MIS Quarterly, Journal of Marketing, Management Science, these are the journals that are ranked as among the top journals in the world, and is in the Financial Times Top 40 journals.  So do we still think we are world class?

Sadly, in Malaysia, we just like to make ourselves feel good with illusion that we are doing great research.