Impact of International Coauthorships to A Young Malaysian University Specializing in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM)

Abstract

Internationalization is defined as a process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the teaching and learning of education.  International co-authorship in research article is one of the means of collaboration towards internationalization.  This paper investigates the impact of international co-authorship in the field of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) for a specialised young university (<50 years old).  The study focused on approximately 9450 articles and the citations ranging from 2012-2017.  The impact due to annual article publication, annual citation count, most cited article, annual citation per article and the correlation between the publication and citation were analysed. The finding shows that faculty members of the university have been collaborated with authors from 86 countries since 1997, which dominated by Asian institutions.  Amongst, top 30 countries with highest international co-authored publications were identified, which led by Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, India, United Kingdom and Japan.  Further in detail, annual citation per article (Cpp) showed that collaborations with European countries e.g. Spain, Netherlands, and Hungry, resulting greater mean Cpp.  On the other hand, the analysis on the cumulative citation trend illustrated that the citation count is proportional to the number of articles.  This study evinced that international co-authorship does show positive impacts to a STEM specialised young university.