Research in Philippine HEIs

How are the top Philippine universities doing in terms of research? A quick glance through SciVerse Scopus (one of two international authorities on academic journals, the other being Thomson Reuters ISI) reveals the following cumulative data from 1985 to February 2012.

UP Diliman had 1,786 published articles, generating 9,205 citations. DLSU had 725 articles and 3,489 citations. UST had 359 articles and 3,193 citations. Ateneo had 303 articles and 1,779 citations.

The numbers of publications and citations are major indicators of academic quality. These numbers, however, need to be seen in relation to the number of faculty members in these universities, as well as the journals in which these faculty members publish. International surveys have a way of figuring out the significance of journals and citations, through formulas like Impact Factor (IF), Hirsch Index (h-index), Eigenfactor, and PageRank. These measures take into account the case when only a few productive faculty members contribute to the total number of citations attributed to a university or when faculty members publish in journals that are listed by ISI or Scopus but are actually not read by leading scholars.

In a public hearing conducted by the Congressional Committee on Higher and Technical Education last February, I voiced my apprehensions about the current practice of our universities of giving cash awards to scholars that publish in ISI journals. I said that this practice is paradoxically harmful to our universities, because our scholars tend to publish in low-impact journals (easier to get into than the top journals) just to get the awards or to get promoted.

Since my fellow scholars will hate me if I propose the abolition of a much-desired benefit, I instead suggest to universities that they double or even triple the cash awards if a scholar publishes in one of the top ten journals in a field. Examples of these top journals are Nature, Science, New England Journal of Medicine, Cell, Journal of Biological Chemistry, and (in my field of literature) Publications of the Modern Language Association.

Sadly, even if we added all the numbers of all the citations of all our universities, we would not come close to those of the leading universities in the world (as of the last THES survey, Caltech, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and Princeton) or even in our region (Tokyo, Hong Kong, NUS, Peking, and Kyoto).

As DepEd Secretary Armin Luistro said in a meeting with publishers last April 2, we should not be competing with each other as we tend to do, but with the world. Perhaps it is time for the top Philippine universities to talk to each other to plan how to come close to Tokyo, if not to Caltech, in terms of research and publications.

ON UNIVERSITY STATUS: Those upset by CHED’s current attempt to redefine the term “university” should look at the existing definition in CMO 48, series of 1996.

According to this CMO, a school may be considered a university if it complies with all of the following conditions:

A university offers a 4-year course in liberal arts, a 4-year course in basic sciences or mathematics, a 4-year course in the social sciences, at least 3 professional courses that require graduates to apply for a license to practice, and at least 2 doctoral programs.

A university has achieved Level 3 accreditation for all undergraduate and 2 graduate programs.

A university must demonstrate excellence in teaching partly through the performance of its graduates in board examinations.

A university must have had at least three years of publishing research in refereed journals.

A university must have a community extension program.

At least 50 percent of its faculty in arts and sciences must be full-time. At least 20 percent of the entire faculty should have doctoral degrees, and at least 10 percent of the entire faculty should be full-time and doctoral degree holders. At least 35 percent of the entire faculty should have master’s degrees and at least 70 percent of these master’s degree holders should be full-time.

A university must have at least 5 hectares of land, 3 of which should be contiguous.

Finally, a university must have a library that conforms to the various orders issued by CHED.

Here is a question for our existing universities. Have they complied with all these conditions, set not recently but as early as 1996? I seriously doubt that most of our universities have achieved Level 3 accreditation for all their undergraduate and at least two graduate programs. I also seriously doubt that most of our universities have a track record of publishing in refereed journals (by which CHED means ISI or Scopus journals). We really ought to rethink the way we grant university status to just about any school Congressmen or LGUs establish, or to any private school that thinks of itself as a university.

On the other hand, it is good that CHED is rethinking its existing definition of a university. For example, in addition to requiring all those numbers, CHED should look at the quality (rather than just the quantity) of research. How exactly is a university doing something for the country, not just in offering its students better chances for employment, but in thinking of ways to help the country get out of the moral mess that we are in right now?