HCM CITY – The University of Economics HCM City (UEH) has announced financial rewards to promote academic research and international publications.

The new policy has been issued as only 15 per cent of the university’s lecturers take part in research and international publishing activities. 

The value of rewards range from VNĐ30 million (US$1,320) to VNĐ200 million ($8,800), with the highest level applied to Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) publications with an impact factor (IF) of more than two points. 

ISI is a prestige bibliographic database of thousands of academic journals. This database allows researchers to identify frequently cited articles and who has cited them. The IF of an academic journal is a measure indicating the average number of citations of articles published in the journal in a year. The higher the IF, the more important a journal is considered to be.

The rewards will be granted till the end of 2020.

Moreover, the university will support each piece of research with VNĐ10 million ($440) in bidding for State-level and the National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) projects, or with VNĐ35 million ($1,540) if it is not approved and transferred to the university-level project.

UEH also plans to establish specialised or interdisciplinary research groups, to invest in facilities and connect research groups with national and international scientific organisations. Research groups with outstanding operation activities can receive rewards of VNĐ35 million ($1540) a year.

Following these efforts, UEH will accelerate conferences on international publications based in several fields, including Finance – Banking, Business Administration – Trade, Law, Information Technology – Mathematics, etc., with experienced lecturers and ISI/Scopus magazines’ editors-in-chief as guest speakers.

A low rate of international scientific publications is not uncommon among Việt Nam’s educational and scientific institutions. According to Web of Science, an online subscription-based scientific citation index service managed by ISI, from 2011 to 2015, Việt Nam had more than 15,000 publications in the ISI category with the growth rate of 17 per cent a year. However, this number is still small in comparison with other regional countries, such as Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. – VNS