SCOPUS-INDEXED SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS OF LAO PDR FROM 1996-2020

Abstract


INTRODUCTION
The increase in research productivity indicates the development of economic growth [1].where many countries reported their status of scientific publications e.g., Thailand, see [8]; Vietnam, see [9]; Malaysia, see [10]; Indonesia, see [11], except for Lao PDR.For that reason, this now necessitates creating detailed information regarding the status of its scientific publications.
As a group of still-developing countries, ASEAN employs the investigation of scientific literature to evaluate their research prosperities and to follow up on their strategic plans and budget allocation for research development.Svasti and Asavisanu [8] revealed the significant growth in the scientific publication output of Thailand with the development of many research disciplines e.g., health technology, see [12]; and translation study, see [13]).Ho [14] and Nguyen et al. [9] also revealed the successful advancement of scientific research in Vietnam in terms of research outputs, while Vuong et al. [15] argued that the scientific publications in Vietnam were still under-developed since the research priority was unbalanced; some topics were overlooked while others were neglected.Bakri et al. [10] also indicated the ongoing process of scientific publication in Malaysia with the increasing trend of many disciplines e.g., clinical medicine, see [16]; engineering, see [17], along with Indonesia, whose progress in development is indicated by the increase of research outputs of different disciplines e.g., dengue, see [18]; mathematics and statistics, see [19].On the other hand, apart from the increase in the total scientific output, Filipino scholars suggested putting more effort into some specific disciplines e.g., psychology, see [20]; development communication, see [21] and nuclear science and technology, see [22] because of the scarcity of literature.Additionally, Arunachalam and Garg [23] suggested medical research was the most productive field in Singapore and the research publications were rarely cited, even those that were published in highimpact journals.Furthermore, Ho et al. [24] reported the gradual development of scientific publications in Brunei, of which the most productive subject areas were ecology, geoscience, and multidisciplinary.In Lao PDR, the report from UNESCO [25] exhibited the largest type of document was the articles, followed by the meeting abstract, review, and book chapter.The study further reported the gradual increase in the scientific research output as it was driven by international aid and national projects.Moreover, the priority of scientific research in Laos was found to be lower.Most of the scientific publications in Laos appeared only as a part of international projects in which domestic scholars participated as the corresponding authors [26 -27].This is due to the limitations in human resources, scientific infrastructure, and domestic research institutes [28].
Although the anecdotal information from scientific papers in Laos has been uncovered, a comprehensive study, especially indexing the Scopus database, is still absent up to this date.Therefore, this study employs Scopus to investigate the scientific productivity of Lao PDR during the last 25 years (1996-2020).

METHOD
Five stages of the general bibliometrics analysis workflow from Börner et al. [29] and Zupic and Čater [30] were used in this study, including: (1) Study designs: the purpose of this quantitative analysis is to investigate the publication outputs of Lao PDR as seen in the Scopus database from 1996 to 2020 to uncover the status of scientific publications and understand the evolution of science and technology development through the lens of the bibliometrics review.
(2) Data collection: by adopting the study of Ho [14], the data collection process included: (a) Data collection: Scopus (http://www.scopus.com)has been chosen as it is the largest single abstract and indexing database [31].Besides, Scopus was launched in 2004, yet it does not include references before 1996 [14], [32].Therefore, this study comprehends the total journal article outputs of (4) Data visualization The data was displayed by using the Rstudio [33].The "ggplot2" function in R was used to visualize the line graph and pie chart.
Moreover, the function so-called "tm" was used to perform the text mining for analyzing the frequency of words that appeared in the title.
(5) Data interpretation the findings will be described and interpreted in the next section.

RESULT AND DISCUSSION
The scientific publications of Lao PDR gradually increasing, yet it is considered too slow.
Despite the small rate of annual growth, the number of scientific papers in Laos gradually increased (Fig. 1).However, with a total of 2,666 articles published over 25 years, Laos' research development lags far behind that of the rest of the world.In comparison with the fellow countries in the region, several studies suggested that the number of scientific publications was relatively too small in comparison with other ASEAN countries [34].Adams et al [35] exhibited the number of total scientific publications of SEA nations from 2014 -2018, Laos ranked below with the output of only 179 papers, smaller than the Philippines eightfold, Indonesia thirteenfold, Thailand forty-sixfold, and Singapore Seventy-sevenfold.Moreover, Thomson Reuters [36] classified "Lao PDR" as a follower group with the least productivity of scientific publications.
Moreover, compared to the countries in ASEAN such as Vietnam, the authors also found that the number of scientific articles in Lao PDR is too small, as during almost the same period, Vietnamese scholars published more than 14,738 articles [14], while the Lao PDR only had 2,666 articles.
The scientific publications in Lao PDR are driven strongly by the international cooperative The majority of publications were international co-authorships, while only a small number of papers were published solely by domestic authors (Table 1).
This wide gap sufficiently provides evidence that the scientific publications of Lao PDR were driven strongly by international collaborations.Besides, unlike international co-authorship, the number of domestic articles remained limited throughout the 25 years (Fig. 2).This indicates the minor contribution of Laotian researchers to the nation's scientific publication hub.
Generally, a large proportion of scientific publications in ASEAN countries are derived from international collaborations since international authorships helped to strengthen the research outputs for both general and specific disciplines [37].The small research output countries (Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia) tended to have a higher share of international collaboration [38].The study of Ho [14] and Nguyen et al. [9] proved a point of this statement by investigating Vietnam's collaboration publications.The result showed that the collaboration publications hold the greatest proportion of publications output, which occupied around 77% of total publications ever recorded.In parallel with the increase of international collaboration in terms of scientific research of ASEAN nations, Kumar et al. [39] and Payumo & Sutton [40] suggested the lack of regional collaboration, which was one of the reasons for the slow development of scientific research in the country.Similar to such fellow countries, Laos still requires enormous support from international fellows in terms of investment, infrastructure, and human resources [41], [38].Therefore, international collaboration is a prioritized strategy that has always been advocated by the Government of Laos for the country's development [42].to improve the country's human resources [43].In terms of the research disciplines, the tropical countries with relatively poor living conditions are the ideal places for studying infected diseases [14], [44].As a result, Thailand, the United States, and the United Kingdom collaborated on medical research focusing on infectious diseases, particularly malaria (Table 2).This is in line with the studies from other ASEAN countries that medical research was the most dominant subject among others (e.g., Singapore, see [23], Thailand, see [45], Indonesia, see [18]).On the other hand,  Moreover, life science studies also received relatively high attention to optimize the nation's income as the Lao economy heavily relied on the agricultural sector [48 -49].In particular, several donors, such as Sida, and IRRI-SDC, played a vital role in the development of agricultural research in Laos in terms of poverty reduction and rural livelihood [50].
The subject area of Laos' publications is uneven.Laos' scientific articles were health-related (Table 3).Moreover, medical doctors and health-related professionals published the most in terms of the number of Laos' scientific publications (Table 4).Interestingly, all of the domestic scholars on the list of the most productive authors are working on relevant projects for the medical sector.Furthermore, the support from several donors such as Thailand, the UK, and the US even intensified the role of medical research.Therefore, the scientific community in Lao PDR is dominated by the health professionals.This is because of the support from internationally funded project to reinforce the livelihood condition of people who are in need such as The Swiss Red Cross, UNICEF, and GIZ, the medical progress have been accelerated and the study of healthrelated issues have been prioritized [56]  The scientific research production in Lao PDR is  The alarm bell for improving human resources and research capacity is ringing.
The domestic authors tended to submit their works to relatively low-impact journals (Table 5), while the collaboration publications were successfully published in relatively high-impact journals (Table 6).
This indicates that domestic scholars should improve the quality of their research to meet the standard of high-ranking journals.This now necessitates improving human resources and research capacity in Lao PDR.To achieve the goals, Chounlamany and Khounphilaphanh [65] recommended that the government of Laos improve the quality of teaching methods, school building, and infrastructure, especially for the teachers who play a major part in the education system by providing them with incentives and motivation.Bounyasone and Keosada [66] further suggested that students should be engaged in all learning processes with the chance to learn new things and express their opinions.The school should be student-centered rather than the old way of teaching, like teacher-centered.Furthermore, while the government of Lao PDR has developed several policies, strategies, and plans to improve human resources, their transparency and predictability need to be improved, especially since corruption is regarded as a national issue in Lao PDR [67].On top of that, the capacity for conducting research in Laos needs to be strengthened.To build the capacity of research in underdeveloped countries, Sawyerr [68]

( 3 )
Lao PDR from 1996 to 2020.The affiliation country is defined as Laos, with the document type of articles from journals written in English.The query strings are as follows: (AFFILCOUNTRY (Laos) AND (LIMIT-TO (PUBYEAR, 2020) OR LIMIT-TO (PUBYEAR, 2019) ... > LIMIT-TO (PUBYEAR, 1997) OR LIMIT-TO (PUBYEAR, 1996) AND (LIMIT-TO (DOCTYPE, "ar") AND (LIMIT-TO (LANGUAGE, "English") AND (LIMIT-TO (SRCTYPE, "j")).A total of 2666 documents were exported from Scopus on February 19, 2021.(b)Data filtering: the data was filtered by the tool provided in Scopus to retrieve the input data (authors, titles, journals, etc).Besides, to assess solely the domestic articles, only "Laos" was included in affiliation countries.On the other hand, to assess the total publications, "Laos" and those 96 countries were included.Later, the documents of the domestic were removed from the total publications to evaluate the collaboration articles.The information was exported in CSV format to perform further analysis.(c)Data cleaning: Several errors that appeared in the extracted file were corrected for example the duplicated affiliations such as the "University of Health Science", "Mahosot Hospital", "Ministry of Health", etc. were corrected in this part.Data analysis The various analytical techniques were applied for the analysis.Firstly, the general statistics were employed to calculate the quantitative information of this study.The information regarding the 2020 metrics indicator of journals and authors (h-index, SNIP, and SJR (Quartile)) were retrieved from the (http://www.scopus.com)and (http:// www.scimagojr.com) on August 1, 2020.

Fig. 2 .
Fig. 2. The growth trend of domestic and collaboration publications of Lao PDR.The most collaborative partner is Thailand, followed by the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and France (fig.3).As a neighboring country with the advancement of science and technology in the region, Thailand has tremendously helped boost scientific research productivity for Lao PDR.The education cooperation between Laos and Thailand has been prioritized since 1992 by regularly providing and allocating scholarships (postgraduate and doctoral training) and budgets for Lao students

the
Australia-Laos and France-Laos collaborations mostly shed light on life science research.ACIAR, part of Australia's aid program fostering international agricultural research, is one of the driving forces behind the success of the Australia-Laos collaboration.Moreover, the bilateral relations between France and Laos permit the reinforcement of agricultural research in Laos through several donors, such as CIRAD, IRD, and water sanitation projects.

Fig. 3
Fig. 3 shows that, as an underdeveloped country, studies towards health and poverty reduction are set as a main priority.To strengthen healthcare service and overcome the severe health crisis, medicine was the most dominant field for Laos' publications as medical research development was supported by evidenceinformed policymaking in the healthcare sector and
Due to funding constraints, particularly the payment of article processing fees for most open access journals, many authors, particularly domestic Lao experts, chose to submit their scientific papers on non-open access models (fig.4).Besides, the lack of high technological skills and research expenditures, extensive human resources, and complicated instrumentation necessitated domestic scholars seeking support from international partners, which led to the medical-related studies towering over the number of Lao's scientific papers.Vice versa, social science was studied the most by domestic authors.Importantly, Siphong [57] and Souriyavongsa et al.[58] suggested that the use of English by Lao students is limited due to a lack of well-trained teachers, insufficient learning periods and curriculum, and an inaccessible learning environment in some areas of Laos.Therefore, this poses a great barrier to domestic authors' publishing their works in international journals.

Fig. 4 .
Fig. 4. The model of publishing.The potential challenges pose a barrier to the scientific publications' development in Lao PDR.Scientific publications in Laos are gradually growing as a result of enormous support from development partners and the aid community to increase human resource capacity, trading, and skilled labor[59].Moreover, the New Economic Mechanisms (NEMs) have paved the way for international investment[60].However, several factors hindering its scientific publication development should not be ignored, especially the socio-economic issue at the heart of the scientific production challenge of Lao PDR.The small population size, a lack of research funding, qualified staff, sophisticated equipment, and domestic research institutions, as well as critical factors such as access, incentive, and adequate foreign language skills, all contributed to the slow progress of research development in Lao PDR[25],[61 -62].Moreover, the incentive policies to persuade researchers to conduct scientific research are limited, plus the policies and plans adopted from other countries could not work well in Laos because of the differences in economic, social, geographic, and infrastructure contexts, especially in the cultural context, as there was a significant epistemological gap between the researchers and policy developers.In other words, in situations where the individual researcher's success and ability to produce publications are frequently underappreciated, the authors are unmotivated to conduct quality research[28],[61].Significantly, the amount of expenditure allocated to education decreased annually and ranked below the global median.It declined considerably from 15.8% to 13.1% from 2015 to 2020 [63].Moreover,

Table 5 . The most popular journals published by domestic authors
suggested that the government should consider two scenarios, including active (skills, abilities, attitudes, and morals of researchers) and the environment (society, institutional, and management).Additionally, Power et al. [69] recommended the government reinforce the graduate study program, strategize effective research management, provide research funding to institutes and academics, and increase access to academic journals.Qualified human resources and strong research capacity contribute significantly to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly the quality of education in Lao PDR.