Steps to Promote Academic Research in Cambodia
Kimkong Heng 20/03/2021 4:24 PM

Promoting academic research activities in Cambodia is particularly challenging. Not only is there a distinct lack of a strong research culture, but there is also limited public interest in research. This is not to mention the inadequacy of technical, financial and intellectual resources needed to support research, both applied and academic research. This short article examines Cambodia’s relatively low research performance and suggests ways to nurture the development of a striving research culture in the country.

Cambodia’s Research Performance

Previous research studies have indicated that research capacity of Cambodian universities and their academics are underdeveloped. Moore (2011) noted the struggle to develop a research culture in Cambodia, while Kwok et al. (2010) argued that research was not considered a core mission of Cambodian universities. A survey by Eam (2015) found that 65% of 444 Cambodian lecturers sampled from 10 universities did not involve in any research within the last five years before the survey. Kitamura et al.’s (2016) survey revealed similar findings, that is, research engagement of Cambodian lecturers was limited.

Likewise, bibliometric analyses have also shown low research productivity of Cambodian lecturers and researchers. An analysis by Nguyen and Pham (2011), for example, found that Cambodia was one of the countries in Southeast Asia that had the lowest research productivity. Other countries in this group included Brunei, Laos and Myanmar. A more recent bibliometric analysis by Barrot (2017) showed similar results. Cambodia was ranked 8th among the 10 ASEAN countries when it came to research output in the field of language and linguistics.

The author’s analysis of publications emanating from Cambodia that are indexed in the Scopus database within the past decade (2010-2019) confirms results of previous studies. For instance, with a total of 3,521 Scopus-indexed publications, Cambodia was ranked 8th out of the 10 Southeast Asian countries, slightly leading Myanmar with 3,039 publications and Laos with 2,364 publications. Malaysia with 277,866 publications over the last 10 years was ranked first, Thailand (143,507 publications) ranked fourth and Vietnam (53,907 publications) ranked sixth in the region (see Figure 1).


Figure 1. Number of Scopus-indexed publications of ASEAN countries (2010–2019). Source: Author’s bibliometric analysis of the Scopus database conducted in June 2020 (see also Heng, 2020a)

In terms of other research-related performance, Cambodia lags behind most of its peers in the region. The country’s innovation capacity was ranked 102nd of out of 141 countries in the 2019 Global Competitiveness Report (World Economic Forum, 2019). This ranking was behind Malaysia (ranked 30th), Thailand (50th) and Vietnam (76th). Additionally, Cambodia’s research and development performance was ranked 121st out of 141 countries, considerably lagging behind Thailand (56th) and Vietnam (72nd).

Meanwhile, Cambodia has no university listed in Times Higher Education’s 2020 World University Rankings, while its neighbours such as Thailand and Vietnam have 16 and three universities, respectively. In fact, Cambodia was among the only three countries in Southeast Asia (including Laos and Myanmar) that has no university listed in the 2020 World University Rankings.
Full article: https://cambodianess.com/article/steps- ... n-cambodia

Heng Kimkong is an Australia Awards scholar pursuing a PhD in Education at the University of Queensland, a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Cambodia Development Center and a co-founder of Cambodian Education Forum.

QUOTE:
Meanwhile, Cambodia has no university listed in Times Higher Education’s 2020 World University Rankings, while its neighbours such as Thailand and Vietnam have 16 and three universities, respectively. In fact, Cambodia was among the only three countries in Southeast Asia (including Laos and Myanmar) that has no university listed in the 2020 World University Rankings.

Well, Thailand had nothing in the top 600 and only two in the top 1000. Not much to be envious of there.

Can’t blame them not prioritising research. If you check out the faculty pages of even the “top” universities in PP the majority don’t hold PhDs, and the ones that do got them from foreign universities.
It’s like criticising their space programme for not having sent anyone to the moon yet.

Research requires dedicated resources, protected time, etc. Do any of the universities even have a statistician on board to do analyses of research?
All this requires oodles of money and time. Something that requires dedication, long term planning, and an investment in culture.

Does this even sound remotely like the Khmer culture as it is now?

PhDs are over-rated.
You only have to look at Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen.

Plagiarism is also endemic here. 98% of graduates don't even know how to give a citation or paraphrase, even those doing an MA. A local bachelor's is about equivalent to a high school degree back home in many ways. This again boils down to research and critical thinking not really being developed in secondary school. Of course this depends on the school/faculty and degree pursued. I'm talking more about general social sciences here.

Another issue is there's really very little literature available in Khmer. By that I mean proper academic journals published in Khmer that can be easily accessed. You could probably fill a small USB with everything which has been published locally. The professors thus have to supplement extensively with outside material (as they do everywhere). However, reading skills are generally quite poor here, so issues are exasperated when you get people who can barely string a sentence in English read texts far beyond their comprehension levels in a foreign language. They just end up frustrated and plagiarize without understand the core concepts. Professors then kinda have to pass everyone if it's widespread...

Then again there are many exceptions. For example, a Khmer professor was hired as a consultant for Disney's Raya just recently, just as one example of many.