| Abstract: |
As an example of a recent emerging economy, Vietnam has witnessed changes in
its research policies and productivity during the last ten years. Since the
establishment of the National Foundation for Science and Technology
Development (NAFOSTED) in 2008, the Vietnamese scientific community had
adapted to new international standards in 2014 and 2017, which resulted in
different productivity between social sciences and humanities (SSH)
disciplines. Therefore, to understand the effects of new research policies,
this study deploys Bayesian analysis on a comprehensive dataset of 1,564
Vietnamese authors in the 2008-2018 period. The dataset was extracted from the
exclusively designed Social Sciences Humanities Peer Award (SSHPA) database
(http://sshpa.com/). Various factors are considered in the data collecting
process, including age, gender, new authors in a year, leading authors,
co-authorship, and journal’s Impact Factor (JIF). The findings indicate three
main characteristics of the Vietnamese SSH community after the research policy
application. First, in terms of output, Economics is the dominant field
relative to other SSH’s disciplines in Vietnam. It has contributed 858
publications in 12 years, about two times as much as the total output of
Education, the second place. Economics also experiences a high level of
contribution from authors at the age of 40-44 and nearly 500 new authors
within the period. Secondly, despite a rapid rise in the number of lead
authors, gender disparity among disciplines is a critical issue. Male
researchers outnumber female ones in Economics and Social medicine, with
Education being the sole exception. Lastly, authors in Education appears to
have less international collaboration than those in Social medicine,
Economics, and other fields. The success of Economics could be a reference
point for other SSH disciplines to increase their research output. These
findings enable a better understanding of SSH research policy application and
call for a more suitable policy to support female academics in a number of SSH
fields. |