[This year,
she helped establish a Southeast Asian network of aquaculture researchers, with
scientists from Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and
Vietnam coming together every three months to share research and develop
doctoral student exchange programs.]
By Liz Gooch
Subha Bhassu, a geneticist and associate professor at the University of Malaya ’s Center for Biotechnology in
Agriculture Research in Malaysia, believes that genome sequencing could help
address these issues, along with the power of collective research.
Dr. Subha and her team have been working with researchers
from the Beijing
Genome Institute and
the Queensland University
of Technology in Australia
since 2009. They have produced joint research papers, taken part in joint staff
training and held student exchanges.
This year, she helped establish a Southeast Asian network
of aquaculture researchers, with scientists from Bangladesh, Indonesia,
Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam coming together every three
months to share research and develop doctoral student exchange programs.
Dr. Subha, who communicates with her Asian counterparts
every few weeks via Skype, is adamant that the most effective way to ensure a
better and safer food supply is for scientists to pool their knowledge and
resources.
“For poverty, for the environment, for sustainability, we
have to work together,” she said.
Research released recently by the British Council found
that many Asian universities had high international research collaboration
rates and that researchers who collaborated across borders were likely to have
their work cited more frequently.
“With the economic integration that has already taken place
in Asia, there’s an incentive for scientists in the region to get to know one
another much more intimately,” said Gerard A. Postiglione, a professor with the
education faculty at the University of Hong
Kong.
In Southeast Asia, a region that has recorded impressive
increases in research output in recent years, many countries have international
collaboration rates above the global average, according to the study by the
British Council and SciVal Analytics.
The study focused on Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia,
Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam and examined articles published
in academic journals in the past five years in fields related to medicine,
science, engineering, technology, social sciences and the humanities.
Janet Ilieva ,
a senior education adviser for the British Council who presented the study at a
conference in Hong Kong last month, said that more than half of the research
from the Philippines and Indonesia was the result of international
collaboration.
More than 90 percent of the articles by academics in Laos,
which produces a relatively small amount of research, involved foreign
scholars. This contrasts with an international collaboration rate of 46 percent
in the United Kingdom.
“I think countries that have a low research output and have
very minimal or small research capacity, they can be very dependent on
international collaboration,” Dr. Ilieva said.
Education academics say that many Asian scientists also
work with counterparts in the West and that greater collaboration within
regions could also help tackle some of the major challenges facing the region,
including urbanization, tropical diseases and climate change.
“Many collaborate with other non-Asean countries,” Dr.
Ilieva added, referring to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
“There’s some Asean collaboration, but it seems to be mainly with a country
from outside Asean.”
Dr. Ilieva attributed this trend in part to greater
research capacity in the West and the fact that many Asian researchers trained
overseas.
“I can only assume that when they go back they carry with
them the research links of the institution that they have studied at,” she
said.
“At this stage quite a lot of the lecturers in East Asia
that hold Ph.D.’s are likely to have studied in a Western country because at
the doctorate level, East Asia is still building their capacity,” she added.
“But as capacity develops, we are likely to see more collaboration between
Asian countries.”
Agricultural science is one area where greater
collaboration is already taking place among Asian nations.
“This seems to be their strength,” Dr. Ilieva said, citing
research into rice production between countries like Thailand and Vietnam as an
example. “It’s a reflection of perhaps the economic priorities from 10 years
ago, because the agricultural sector is a significant contributor to the gross
domestic product of the country.”
Malaysia’s research output has grown an average of 38
percent per year over the past five years, compared with a worldwide average of
3 percent. According to Dr. Ilieva, the country was trying to diversify its
research portfolio beyond the agricultural sector by placing more focus on engineering,
technology and the medical sciences.
“It’s an indicator of a country that is building up its
research capacity and will one day be a major player,” Dr. Ilieva said.
Dr. Postiglione, who is also director of the Wah Ching Center of Research on Education in China , said it was already common for
top-tier Asian universities to collaborate with top universities in the West,
while collaboration between Asia’s best institutions was growing.
“We know there’s rising collaboration among China, Japan,
South Korea and Singapore, among other places in Asia,” he said.
Dr. Postiglione said that Hong Kong and Singapore were
leaders in Asia in terms of international collaboration. He attributed this to
the fact that English was widely spoken in both places and that they recruited
many academics from around the world.
But Dr. Postiglione said that most Hong Kong research
collaboration took place with mainland China or Western countries. Meanwhile,
collaboration between top-tier Asian universities and less-established
institutions in the region was lagging.
“Unfortunately, that hasn’t yet taken off in a big way,”
Dr. Postiglione said, adding that economic integration across Asia had not
increased regional collaboration in higher education research to the extent
that could have been expected.
Dr. Postiglione said many Asian doctoral students still
viewed top universities in North America and Europe as the places to aim for
“because of their research facilities, famous scientists, and academic and
intellectual freedom and vitality.”
According to researchers, language differences, a lack of
research capacity and insufficient funding are among the current barriers to
greater collaboration within Asia.
Dr. Postiglione said that research needed to be done in
English to have the greatest impact and that the lack of a common language
could present difficulties in parts of Asia where English is not widely spoken.
With a gap between established universities in Asia and newcomers, finding
institutions with similar research capacities can also be challenging.
But there is plenty of incentive for Asian researchers to
seek out collaborative opportunities.
The British Council research found that articles by
international teams of researchers attracted about twice as many citations as
research produced domestically.
The rate for some countries is even higher. For Indonesian
researchers, for instance, articles produced with an international author
attracted six times as many citations.
Dr. Ilieva said that other research showed that the number
of citations increased as the number of collaborating countries rose.
She believed that internationally produced articles were
likely to have a greater impact because of the perception that global problems
were best addressed by international research teams.
“We are likely to see a shift from bilateral types of
collaboration to multilateral collaborations because the relevance of the
research grows with the number of participating countries,” she said.
Mok Ka-ho, chair professor of comparative policy at the Hong Kong Institute of Education , said that collaboration between
academia and industry had also increased. For example, companies from Japan,
South Korea and Taiwan have opened research facilities in mainland China. “This
is leading to more opportunities to engage universities in the China mainland,”
he said.
Dr. Mok is also the chairman of the East Asian Social Policy research network, which was
established in 2005 to promote collaborative study in areas like social welfare
and population growth. More than 300 scholars and doctoral students from
mainland China, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and
European countries have joined the group.
Dr. Mok said that the researchers benefited from working on
problems that affected the region. “I think this is the way forward,” he said.
