Research performance evaluations of Thailand national research universities during 2007-2009

Abstract

In 2009, the Office of the Higher Education Commission (OHEC), Ministry of Education in Thailand had, for the first time, announced and approved a list of nine outstanding research universities out of 24 public universities under the Thailand National Research University (Thailand-NRU) initiative to be world-class universities. However, the research performances of these 24 universities have never been evaluated and revealed. This work aimed to assess the research performances of the public universities in Thailand using the Web of Science (WoS) database, and investigate whether or not their research performances correspond to those approved by the OHEC. The results suggested that the top six universities that had highest average number of published articles and citations during the three evaluation years were Mahidol University, Chulalongkorn University, Chiang Mai University, Prince of Songkla University, Kasetsart University and Khon Kaen University. However, the universities with lower number of published articles appeared to perform better in terms of average citation/article and citations received/cited article. Only 60 percent of the published articles were responsible for all citations received for Thai universities during 2007—2009. The average value of citation/article for all Thai universities was 1.757, but if only cited articles (60.4 percent) were considered, the ratio increased to 2.876. The research results in this work suggested that the top nine universities based on their research performances corresponded very well to those approved by the Office of the Higher Education Commission (OHEC, 2010) under the 2009 Thailand’s National Research University Initiative only in terms of research productivity and impact.