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 ANOVA was used and to investigate the impact of economic growth and internet usage on publication productivity, multiple regression analysis was applied. The results showed that the rate 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 that there was a positive and significant correlation between GDP and the number of internet users with the number of publications in ASEAN and Malaysian universities. Internet usage had much more influence in comparison with the GDP in predicting the number of publications among 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 managers should spend much more percentage of their GDP on Internet facilities and research studies that their outputs lead to more rapid economic growth and internet usage