October 14, 2012

ASIAN RESEARCHERS REACH OUT TO ONE ANOTHER

[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

KUALA LUMPUR — Freshwater prawns are becoming an increasingly important component of the aquaculture industry in Asia, but farmers have to deal with problems related to disease, reproduction and climate change.
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.