Several years ago, Prof Sombatsompop, president of Thai Citation Index (TCI) proposed building a database for the whole ASEAN region – ACI, which can serve as a bridge to connect NCI (national citation index) of member countries with international databases such as ISI and Scopus.

ACI has the function of storing and seeking articles and citations which classify and assess the quality of scientific journals in ASEAN countries, like TCI and NCIs. 

However, in order to be found in the database, scientific journals must meet higher requirements in appearance and content, close to Scopus requirements.

The aim of ACI is to have 500 standard scientific journals become a database big enough to connect Scopus. By the end of 2016, ACI had half of the total.

In Vietnam, Hanoi National University has tried to create a Vietnam Citation Index (VIC) on a small scale. 

Three Vietnam journals applied to join ACI in December 2016, but only one of them could meet the requirements and got the minimum score (15/20 to be accepted. The other two got 11/20 and 12/20 score). The results were anticipated by Prof Sombatsompop at a workshop held six months before.

The other two journals were not accepted because they did not get scores in the categories of websites (they did not provide sufficient information and did not have the function for sending articles online), magazine policies (inconsistency), and document quotations.

Also in December 2016, Thailand had 32 journals meeting requirements, Malaysia had 50, Singapore five and Indonesia had 25.

In comparison with more developed countries in the region, Vietnam is not only inferior in terms of using English in scientific research, but it also lacks an online publication system.

While Thailand has ThaiJO, Malaysia has My Jurnal and the Philippines has E-Journal, Vietnam has no platform. 

Vietnam’s Press Law does not allow journals to publish articles in English only. They have to publish articles in Vietnamese first and then translate the articles into English. This is a barrier for scientific journals.

Meanwhile, Vietnam has to deal with another big problem – forged journals published on the Internet. 

The journals advertise themselves as belonging to some certain international scientific database with high impact factors. They allow open access to articles, but collect money from authors to publish articles.

The journals are mostly located in India, China and some African countries, though they advertise they are based on some certain developed countries.