Erwida Maulia, Jakarta – Poor research funding and quality are the biggest constraints to turning the country's universities into world-class institutions, a discussion heard here Thursday.
The National Education Ministry's director general for higher education Fasli Jalal said Indonesia produced only a small number of scientific journals annually.
Citing figures from the 2007 Knowledge Economy Index, Fasli said Indonesia produced only 0.8 technical journal articles per 1 million people. The figure is far below, for example, India with 12 technical journal articles per 1 million people and Malaysia with 21.3.
"What makes it really hard for us to improve our universities' global rankings is the (low) productivity of our researchers. And this is accompanied with poor citation index of our published journals," he said in a forum on world-class universities organized by the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) alumni association.
ITB rector Djoko Santoso said funding was still the main issue behind Indonesian universities' poor research performance, citing as an example the fact that ITB's research funds amounted to only Rp 35 billion (US$3.8 million) in 2007 and Rp 37 billion this year.
"What about research funds in other universities? Of course they receive even less," Djoko said.
Trisakti University rector Thoby Mutis said what differentiated Indonesia from the United States, the world leader in universities, was that Indonesia's institutions received only a small amount of available research funds while in the United States most such money went to universities.
Indonesia is home to over 1,500 universities, but the Times Higher Education Supplement included only three of the country's higher learning institutions in its list of the world's top 400 in 2007, with Yogyakarta's Gadjah Mada University (UGM) in 360th place, ITB in 369th and the University of Indonesia (UI) in Jakarta in 395th.
The Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, which uses the intensity of information and communication technology utilization as main indicators of good universities, ranked UGM 819th, ITB 826th and UI 1,290th this year.
Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Ranking for World Universities (ARWU), meanwhile, includes no Indonesian universities in its rankings of the world's top 500 and Asia-Pacific's top 100 universities in 2008.
Fasli promised more research funds would be available to local universities next year through a number of research grant programs.
Speakers at Thursday's discussion also raised the issue of language bias in global university rankings.
Secretary of the State Ministry for Research and Technology, Benyamin Lakitan, said universities in the United States and the United Kingdom benefited from having English as their mother tongue, while English papers had greater chances of having high citation indexes.
Non-English speaking countries like Indonesia, he said, unfortunately were disadvantaged in this respect.