Malaysia’s research interests in ASEAN and East Asia: an Malaysia exploratory study

Abstract

Malaysia's trade and investment with other ASEAN countries are mainly market-led rather than by the ASEAN economic cooperation initiatives. Moreover Malaysia, like other member countries in ASEAN, is also struggling to implement the ASEAN Economic Blueprint. In this regard, more research on ASEAN issues is important for understanding the relevance of ASEAN to the country. The research community in the country can and should be harnessed to examine these issues as well. In view of this, the objective of this paper is to examine Malaysia's research interest in ASEAN as a regional community. East Asia as a regional grouping is also studied as a comparator. The importance of this research is based on the fact that Malaysia has a dynamic higher education sector, with 20 public universities and more than 450 private higher education institutions. The government has also appointed five Research Universities (RUs) since 2007 and has increased the research funding for these universities in turn are required to increase their research and published output, especially in indexed journals. The research question therefore uses bibliometric data based on the Scopus databank to determine the areas of research interests to Malaysia’s researchers. The main findings in this paper indicate that more studies have been done on the ASEAN region as compared to the EA region. However, individual country studies are more common than studies on the region.