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KUALA LUMPUR: A special committee to oversee research papers before being published in journals has been established to uphold quality and credibility, says Datuk Mustapha Sakmud.
The Deputy Higher Education Minister said the committee, which consists of experts from public universities, aimed to study publication trends in “predatory journals” that were merely profit-based.
He added that the government has spent millions of ringgit paying such publishers that did not emphasise quality and had weak evaluation criteria.
“The committee will also put forward several motions to improve publications of papers and curb the publication in predatory journals such as through sharing the list of such journals and criteria projection as stipulated in the Malaysia Research Assessment (MyRA),” he said during Ministers’ Questions Time in the Dewan Rakyat on Monday (March 18).
Mustapha was earlier responding to a question by Tan Hong Pin (PH-Bakri) who had asked the government to state the steps taken by the Ministry to address the issue of the high paper withdrawal rates in academic journals.
The deputy minister also said that the Higher Education Department has also issued a circular that prohibits the use of government grants to pay publications at certain publishers.
“The ministry will provide further emphasis on universities to focus on their specific niche.
“With this, it could assure the quality of education of the university,” Mustapha added.
He also acknowledged that Malaysia ranked sixth as the countries with the highest retraction rates with 17.2 articles retracted for every 10,000 publications.
However, Mustapha said the figure was small compared to the total publications.
“It is true that Malaysia has been ranked sixth (in the chart) but this is not a concern. We have worked to ensure that our researchers and their studies are scrutinised as best as possible, starting from the university level itself until before publication.
“If there’s any issue with their papers, we will return the study (and not be published). The statistics showed that (in Malaysia) only 17.2 articles out of 10,000 were retracted,” he said responding to Tan’s supplementary question.
Last year, an analysis by Nature on research papers found that Malaysia was ranked among the top eight countries with the most retractions.
The chart, showing the number of articles retracted per 10,000 publications in 2023, was topped by Saudi Arabia with 30.6 articles, followed by Pakistan (28.1 articles) and Russia (24.9 articles).
