VietNamNet Bridge - In 2011-2015, Vietnam had 11,738 scientific works published internationally, but had only 20 percent of industrial enterprises with modern technologies and most of them are foreign invested ones.

 

The HCM City Hi-tech Agricultural Park

The report released in late May on the implementation of the policies on science & technology development showed that the number of scientific articles and works published internationally in the last five years was 2.2 times higher than that in 2006-2010.

Le Thi Nga, member of the National Assembly’s Standing Committee, asked Deputy Minister of Science & Technology at a committee’s session to clarify the information that the money from the state budget has been used to have scientific works published internationally, and that the amount of money increased by 19.5 percent annually.

Khanh replied that the number of scientific works registered for international publication through NAFOSTED (the National Foundation for Science and Technology) increased by 30 percent every year. In principle, internationally published articles must appear twice in prestigious journals.

Also according to Khanh, NAFOSTED has the budget of VND300 billion a year to fund scientific research in natural and social sciences. It costs about VND800 million to have one article published internationally.

In 2011-2015, Vietnam had 11,738 scientific works published internationally, but had only 20 percent of industrial enterprises with modern technologies and most of them are foreign invested ones.

However, while the number of scientific articles published internationally was on the rise, the number of high-technology enterprises was still modest. Except for enterprises in telecommunication, oil & gas, aviation, finance & banking sectors, the majority of Vietnamese enterprises still use backward technologies which are 2-3 generations behind the times.

Vietnam strived to have 30 incubators by 2015 which would help develop high technologies and hi-tech enterprises. 

However, the goal remains unattainable. To date, only nine incubators have been set up, or only 30 percent of the plan.

The statistics on S4VN (Scientometrics for Vietnam) confirmed that Vietnam’s ISI (information science institute) publications have been increasing in the last five years with the number of publications for the first time exceeding 3,000 articles in 2015.

With 3,060 articles published in 2015 as of June 2, 2016, the number of internationally published articles saw an increase of 11.5 percent compared to 2014 (2,744 articles) and two-fold increase compared with 2011 (1,508).

According to S4VN, the total number of internationally published articles in 2011-2015 was 11,791, and the annual growth rate of ISI publications was 10-20 percent. The growth rate was very high, 28 percent, in 2013.

With 11,791 ISI articles in the last five years, Vietnam ranks fourth in the region, after Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand.

Though Vietnam is among the top countries with high numbers of internationally published articles, it lags far behind the leading country of Singapore.

In the last five years, Singapore had 68,516 internationally published articles, which was six times higher than Vietnam’s.

Le Van