Southeast Asia Social Science Academic Journal Publishing and PhD Student Numbers

As a footnote to this section, if you are an author in Southeast Asia, you might find it interesting that there was only one social science journal indexed in Scopus or SJR for the countries of Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos until recently. This one journal was the Kasetsart Journal of Social Sciences (KJSS) in Bangkok, Thailand. When you consider that Thailand was reported in 2017 to have 25,000 Ph.D. students in 1,000 programs, up from 1,380 students in 2008 [23], the stress and difficulty at finding a journal that is acceptable to your faculty can be overwhelming. Fortunately, it appears that Bangkok’s Assumption University ABAC Journal has moved into these indexes (SJR) and at the same time stated they were going to start charging on 1 January 2021 $60 as an article submission fee, and if accepted, an additional APC of $240 [156].

Unfortunately, Malaysia is also projecting 60,000 Ph.D. students under government support [105] vying for a publishing slot in just one of its 109 domestic journals indexed in SJR.  Thailand has 58 SJR indexed journals in all disciplines for their 25,000 Ph.D. students, Indonesia 58, Vietnam 2, Cambodia 0, Laos 0, and Myanmar 0 (as of December 2020).

In Vietnam, the National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED), refers to international publishing as the sine qua non for research grant outputs. In addition, the profile of the principal investigator and key investigators in a research project, as recorded in ISI Clarivate WOS and Scopus, is essential when it comes to receiving a grant. In 2017 new regulations on PhD education required a PhD candidate to have at least one publication indexed in ISI Clarivate WOS or Scopus prior to the final defence of their thesis.  A similar condition applies to a PhD candidate’s supervisor: to be eligible to be a supervisor, a lecturer must also have at least one publication indexed in ISI Clarivate WoS or Scopus [160]. On average, a university pays faculty who have published in an international article about US$1,000 to US$2,000, or even as much as US$10,000 for an article published in a high-impact factor journal.

For the most part, foreign authors have an even steeper mountain to climb if they want to publish in these regional publications. When you consider that one of the world’s largest journal publishers (Elsevier) publishes an average of 140 papers per journal per year [155], one can easily see the magnitude of the problem on where and how to publish your research.