I wrote:
> > Japanese
> > universities are moving towards greater requirements on their academics to
> > publish in international journals in English. Alongside these moves, we
> > should be promoting the adoption of a deposit mandate to ensure the broadest
> > impact of these articles.
Syun replied:
> I don't think I can agree. Japaense research institutions were under
> severe pressure toward pulihishing their results in international
> journals in the 1990s and they, together with the never-stable
> government then, have succeeded in increasing the number of articles
> published in the impact-factor branded journals, which are
> international, in ten years. Last year, China overtook Japan in terms
> of the number of published articles and Japan's "market share" is
> gradually decreasing, but China has over ten times as large a
> population so I don't care. The pressure still continues, as you say
> in your posting, of course, but the researchers here apparently want
> to talk to those in rich enough universities worldwide through the
> impact-factor branded journals, whose number is far less than half of
> Stevan's "25,000" titles. And the pressure itself is equally strong
> all over the advanced societies including China.
>
> You say the Japanese universities are now forced to improve their
> international representation, and I agree. But if you look at the THE
> ranking or other rankings, the problem about our universities does not
> lie in their research impact but in their "education" impact.
> Research related scores, like the number of articles published in
> branded journals, have been going up, probably not because of the
> organic growth of the production but because of the improvement of the
> precision in counting, though the institutional summary is actually
> very difficult on account of the tough task of name disumbiguation(The
> University of Tokyo might have increased their score thanks to the
> many other Tokyo Universities of <Scholary-Genre-Name> which tend to
> be merged as part of Tokyo University, though the accuracy is getting
> better).
>
> So I should say that if the international thing is important in the
> Japanese context, that's not the issue around education rather than
> research. The university management is under higher pressure with
> respect to education than to research. Without good enough students,
> universities can not survive only with good researchers. I don't
> think this is any "Nihonjinron" but an objective view of the situation
> of the current Japanese higher education. So the talks about
> mandating can't get prioritized in terms of management and the faculty
> is passive not because of bureaucracy but because just "sitting
> pretty." Of course, this does not mean I would not argue for the
> mandating in the good sense.
>
> Thanks anyway for rainsing such interesting but arguably important
> points.
Thanks for your detailed reply. This helps me in writing my talk for HOkkaido
to understand the differences between a top tier and second tier university
in Japan. It may indeed be that those at top tier Universities are currently
under pressure to improve their international teaching credentials in order
to improve their ranking positions. However, outside the top 10 Japanese
universities the pressure to improve international research as well as
educational performance is very high. Even within the top ten, Keio
University is putting strong pressure on staff to perform well
internationally in research. If the belief that only high impact factor
journals matter and that only those in other universities which can afford
full tollgate access to these journals matter as readers, then that is an
important point for me to address in my talk at Hokkaido.
--
Professor Andrew A Adams aaa_at_meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration, and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan http://www.a-cubed.info/
Received on Mon Sep 20 2010 - 02:20:41 BST