The rise of research on development economics in Vietnam: Analyses and implications for the public and policymakers from SSHPA 2008-2020 dataset

Abstract

Over three decades of economic reform since 1986, Vietnam has gone from one of the poorest in the world to a lower-middle-income country. To bring the economy to the next level, science and technology development has been viewed as one of the major instruments with various new policies being introduced since 2008. Consequently, scientific publications have become an important intellectual resource. The field of development economic research also benefits from the focus on science and technology. Yet, little is known about the overall research landscape of the field. This thesis, hence, aims to fill this knowledge gap by studying a bibliometric dataset of development economic research in Vietnam from 2008 to 2020, which was extracted from The Social Sciences and Humanities Peer Awards (SSHPA) database. Descriptive and Bayesian statistics were used for analysis. We observed a steady growth of scientific publications over the years. Quantitative studies dominate the field, probably because of the availability of secondary data. The number of authors increased significantly, but the productivity is highly skewed toward the top 5% authors, who contributed 50.61% of total publications. Collaboration pattern witnessed a significant change: less dependence on foreign colleagues and the emergence of domestic research groups. The list of journals and publishers where Vietnamese authors published the most shows high quality and reputation. Although traditional paywalled publishing is common, the result suggests that open access (OA) is being adopted widely. In fact, OA articles tend to get more citations. Meanwhile, the citation is negatively associated with female authors and the number of Vietnamese authors. Finally, the number of foreigners in an article, and the participation of female authors tend to increase the quartile of the article.

English or Vietnamese

“…January 19, 2021 I extracted articles in development economics from the SSHPA database [1] and then used it as the main weapon for my master's thesis [2]. The final result was a 71-page long manuscript, perhaps the size of a small book, that provides an overview of this critically important research field in Vietnam.…”