Publication Trends by Indonesia and Malaysia Affiliated Researchers About Public Policy, Technology, and Economics

This paper aims to investigate the number of research articles authored by Indonesia and Malaysia affiliated researchers on three issues, namely, public policy, technology, and economics. This study focuses on articles indexed by Scopus in ten year period 2010-2019. The data shows that Indonesia affiliated researchers are less productive in the beginning of the period. At the end of the period, Indonesia affiliated researchers produce more articles published internationally for public policy, technology, and economics issues. Furthermore, in total for any topics at the end of the period, Indonesia affiliated researchers publishes more articles. However, if the number of published research articles is compared to the number of the populations, Indonesian researchers are still left behind Malaysian.


Introduction
Since 2014, the Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education of the Republic of Indonesia has stipulated an operational guidance for the promotion of academic ranks of lecturers that motivates lecturers to publish their research results internationally (http://pak.ristekdikti.go.id). Moreover, international publications are targeted to be indexed by reputable databases, such as Scopus and Web of Science, including journals and conferences. Publication trends based on countries and fields have been investigated by a number of researchers. The following studies are referred to some of the publication. Bah, et al. [1] studied the publication trend in Gambia. Rizzoli, et al. [2] and Wondirad [3] presented their research on publication trends in social sciences. Publication trends in natural sciences have also been investigated by several researchers, such as Liou [4], Niforatos [5], as well as Olson and Bae [6]. Chang, et al. [7] discovered the publication trends in science education research. Some others have studied publication trends and productivity based on geographical region, such as in Malaysia [8] and Vietnam [9].
In a number of occasions, officers of the Ministry of Research, Technology, and Higher Education of the Republic of Indonesia compared the publication productivity of Indonesian affiliated researchers with those of other neighbouring countries', especially that of Malaysian ones. This can be traced from some sources, such as the website of the Ministry (https://risbang.ristekdikti.go.id/publikasi/berita-media/2019publikasi-ilmiah-indonesia-teratas-di-asia-tenggara). Their comparisons motivated this research paper. This paper, aim to investigate the number of research articles published inernationally and indexed by Scopus (https://www.scopus.com). The study is limited to articles authored by Indonesia and Malaysia affiliated researchers, and article with issues on public policy, technology, and economics issues. These three issues are chosen to be considered because, according to the authors' judgement, public policy and technology support the development of a country's economy. The observation shows that the trend of the number of research articles for these three issues in the two countries increases with a note that Indonesia's was left behind Malaysia's.
This paper is structured as follows: research methodology is described in Section 2, results and discussion are provided in Section 3, and conclusion of this paper is in Section 4.

Research Methodology
In this research, the data was gathered from Scopus on 3 January 2020 at 20.00 Western Indonesia Time. The data was viewed using the Document search tool available in Scopus. In total, there were eight data sets.
Six data sets were harvested using the following method: 1. Data set for the number of documents about public policy authored by Indonesia affiliated researchers indexed by Scopus for the period 2010-2019 was taken using the keywords 'public policy' in the Article title, Abstract, Keywords fields and 'Indonesia' in the affiliation country field. 2. Data set for the number of documents about public policy authored by Malaysia affiliated researchers indexed by Scopus for the period 2010-2019 was taken using the keywords 'public policy' in the Article title, Abstract, Keywords fields and 'Malaysia' in the affiliation country field. 3. Similar techniques to Steps 1 and 2 above were also used to harvest the data about 'technology' and 'economics'. Two additional data sets were harvested using the following method:  After the data has been collected into tables, the data was plotted to investigate the trend of the publication about these three issues (public policy, technology, and economics) as well as any topics for both countries (Indonesia and Malaysia).

Results and Discussion
This section shows the eight data sets that have been harvested from Scopus as stated in Section 2 as seen in Table 1. To investigate the trend of this data, graphical comparisons are shown in Figure 1 for public policy, Figure 2 for technology, Figure 3 for economics, and Figure 4 for any topics.

Conclusion
This study presented eight data sets of number of research articles authored by Indonesia and Malaysia affiliated researchers about public policy, technology, and economics issues, as well as about any topics. The data sets were taken from Scopus for the period of ten years, 2010-2019. We obtain that from the beginning of the period, Indonesia's was left behind Malaysia's number of research publication for all issues. At the end of this period, Indonesia over took Malaysia in terms of the number of publications. However, in terms of the proportion between the number of published research articles and the country's population, Indonesia's is still left behind Malaysia's. For the future research, investigation on how public policy influences the productivity of researchers in publishing their research results internationally can be conducted.

Acknowledgements
We thank Sanata Dharma University for financially supporting this research. We declare that we do not have conflict of interests related to the publication of this research results.