Economic Growth and Internet Usage Impact on Publication Productivity among ASEAN’s and World’s Best Universities

Measuring the number of papers which are published each year,
publication productivity is the factor which shows the reputation of
universities and countries. However, the effect of growing economy and
using internet on the publication productivity in Asian countries has
not been discovered yet. The present research is going to figure out the
publication productivity among the elite universities in Asian
countries and also ten top universities around the world in the last
twenty years (from 1993 to 2012). Furthermore, the current research is
aimed to study the relationship among publication, gross domestic
product (GDP) and internet usage. It is worth to mention that the
publication of the top Ten Malaysian Universities was regarded for the
similar period of time. To get the exact numbers of documents like
papers, conference articles, review papers and letters which are
published by the universities in the last twenty years, the writer of
the same paper used the Science Direct database. Moreover, the data for
GDP and the number of internet usage was collected through the World
Bank database (World Data Bank).To compare all kinds of
publications,one-way ANOVAwas used and to investigate the impact of
economic growth and internet usageon publication productivity, multiple
regression analysis was applied.The results showed that therate of
publication growth was 1.9, 20.9, and 65.5 % in top universities in the
world, ASEAN countries and Malaysia, respectively.The results also
showed thatthere was a positive and significant correlationbetween GDP
and the number of internet users with the number of publications in
ASEAN and Malaysian universities. Internet usagehad much more influence
in comparison withthe GDP in predicting the number of publicationsamong
these groups except for top ten Malaysian universities from 2003 to
2012. In summary, publication trends in top ten Malaysian and ASEAN
universities are promising. However, policy makers and science
managersshouldspend much more percentage of their GDP on Internet
facilities and research studies that their outputs lead to more rapid
economic growthand internet usage.