Research Publication Output by Academicians in Public and Private Universities in Malaysia

The number of publication has been one of the measurement values in the performance evaluation for higher education academicians. Over the years, the obligation to publish has amplified to not just on getting published but also on getting published in high quality journal whereby the quality ranking is determined by publication categories. This paper gives an account on the publication output on Scopus by the Malaysian private and the public universities in 2010. The study employed a query search on the Malaysian universities affiliation using Scopus database. The result of the search was tabulated and narrowed to journal publications and the other types of publication such as reviews, proceedings and letters were omitted. The number of journal publications by each university was listed out and comparison on the average was made. Comparison was made between the average number of publications by the private and the public universities. Findings show that the spur on publishing among Malaysian universities has taken effect. The study found that the Malaysian private universities published a distinctively smaller number of documents in Scopus compared to the public universities. The percentage for publication of journal article from the overall Scopus publication type journal articles published by the private universities was also smaller compared to the public universities. In other words, compared to the public universities, the authors in the Malaysian private universities had lower inclination to publish journal articles and were more likely to publish in conference proceedings, reviews and articles in press. The discussion section explores the reasons for these differences and presents the possible trending on the issue of publication in Malaysia.