Publication productivity, as measured by the number
of papers, has been regarded as one of the main indicators of reputation
of countries and institutions. Nevertheless, the relationship among
research publications, economic growth and World Wide Web in ASEAN
countries is still unclear. The main intention of this study was to
identify publication productivity among ASEAN and the world’s top ten
countries in the last 16 years (1996-2011). This study also aimed at
finding the relationship among publication, gross domestic product (GDP)
and internet usage. Furthermore, the publication trend in the 10 first
Malaysian universities was evaluated for the same periods. Scopus
database was used to find the overall documents, overall citations,
citations per document and international collaboration from 1996 to 2011
for each country. The World Bank database (World Data Bank) was used to
collect the data for GDP and the number of internet users. Moreover, to
evaluate 10 top Malaysian universities, the number of published
articles, conferences, reviews, and letters for the same periods was
collected. The results of this study showed significant differences
among ASEAN and top 10 countries regarding publication productivity.
Moreover, a positive and significant relationship was observed between
indices, GDP and internet usage for these countries. Surprisingly,
international collaboration had a significant and negative relationship
with economic growth. Malaysia had fewer citations per document (7.64)
and international collaboration (36.9%) among ASEAN countries. In
conclusion, international collaboration between academic institutes and
researchers is influenced by economic growth and access to internet in
the countries. Furthermore, publication trends in ASEAN countries are
promising. However, policy makers and science managers should try to
find different ways to increase the quality of the research publication
and to raise citation per document.