Will Vietnam surpass 20,000 international publications in 2024?

Total national R&D expenditure accounts for 0.42% of GDP

According to the research results and international publications of the Vietnamese higher education system in recent years, there has been a steady and sustainable increase, in which higher education institutions always play a leading role in scientific publications of the whole country.

Vietnam's international publication results in the recent period are as follows:

According to the National Agency for Science and Technology Information (2021), the total national R&D expenditure accounts for 0.42% of GDP, of which the State budget accounts for 30.9%. The higher education sector accounts for 1/3 of the total number of full-time equivalent (FTE) researchers nationwide and 3/4 of the total number of researchers with doctoral degrees nationwide.

Regarding the number of articles published in Scopus publications in the 3 years from January 2022 to the end of July 2024, the 67 higher education institutions with the largest number of publications alone accounted for 83.5% of the total number of articles in the country.

However, R&D funding for universities only accounts for 6.75% of the total national R&D funding, reaching approximately VND 2,434 billion or VND 97.3 million per FTE (compared to VND 476 million per FTE of the entire system).

Open research topics in Mathematics

The Ministry of Education and Training said that in the 2023-2024 school year, the Ministry of Education and Training has opened research topics on Mathematics with the aim of: Supporting young lecturers and teachers to carry out topics and projects on Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, models and methods of modern Mathematics education.

Accordingly, the ministerial-level science and technology topics implement the Prime Minister's Decisions; Topics implementing the Physics Development Program according to Decision 1187/QD-TTg on developing the Physics Program for the period 2021-2025; Topics implementing the Basic Science Development Program in the fields of Chemistry, Life Sciences, Earth Sciences and Marine Sciences (Program 562): According to Decision No. 562/QD-TTg dated April 25, 2017 of the Prime Minister.

The leader of the Ministry of Education and Training said that the Ministry of Education and Training has maintained the ministerial-level topics regularly over the years to contribute to improving the quality of training and scientific research of higher education institutions. In addition to the scientific and practical values, the ministerial-level topics also attract a large number of staff from higher education institutions under the Ministry to participate in scientific research, contributing to supporting doctoral students, master's training, and students to participate.

Accordingly, all approved topics have products published internationally by ISI, Scopus, ACI, and published domestically in scientific journals in the State Council of Professors' work scoring list, postgraduate training, encouraging transfer application products, registering intellectual property, and are clearly ordered by the Ministry of Education and Training in terms of products and funding, facilitating budgeting, settlement, and acceptance assessment. In 2023, the Ministry of Education and Training approved and assigned the implementation of 295 ministerial-level topics.

In 2023, the Ministry of Education and Training issued Decision No. 4555/QD-BGDDT dated December 28, 2023 promulgating the Regulations on rewards for valuable scientific publications, inventions, useful solutions and plant varieties in affiliated higher education institutions.

Accordingly, there are 27 useful solutions, 25 inventions and 2,211 scientific articles published in journals in the Web of Science database, ranked Q1,2 by Scimago organization in 32 higher education institutions under the ministry.

The Ministry of Education and Training has also organized the implementation of the task of organizing the awarding of outstanding mathematical works in the field of Mathematics in 2023; 35 works were awarded the Outstanding Mathematical Works Award in 2023, including 05 First Prizes, 12 Second Prizes and 18 Third Prizes.