MALAYSIA, October 6, 2017 – Malaysia’s most promising and influential researchers were  honored with the Malaysia’s Research Star Award 2017, which was presented at Putrajaya on October 5. This is the third time that Malaysia’s Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) and Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to enable the research ecosystem to accelerate discovery, are jointly presenting these awards to recognize  outstanding Malaysian researchers who are cited and acknowledged by their peers worldwide for their contribution to global science. Gracing the award ceremony was Malaysia’s Minister of Higher Education, Datuk Seri Idris Jusoh.

Said Dr. David Liu, Managing Director of Asia Pacific, Clarivate Analytics, “We are honored to collaborate with MOHE for the third year running to recognize outstanding Malaysian researchers in their pursuit of scientific discovery. We strongly support the R&D efforts of Malaysia’s research and business community, and will continue to work closely with MOHE and Malaysia’s institutions and organizations to help them identify world-class research excellence and promote academia-industry research collaboration to drive innovation in support of Malaysia’s TN50 national initiative¹.”

The nine awardees for 2017 were selected by a special steering committee. This year, the Malaysia Research Star Awards were presented in five categories – Frontier Researcher (three awardees), Women in Science (one awardee), Economic Impact Researcher (three awardees), Young Researcher (one awardee) and Hot Review Paper (one awardee). The Women in Science Award and Economic Impact Researcher Award are new categories introduced this year while the 2017 Hot Review Paper Award replaced the 2016 Highly Cited Review Paper Award. The awardees span a variety of research disciplines such as engineering, agricultural sciences, materials science, chemistry, social sciences and environment/ecology.

The awards were first presented as Malaysia’s Rising Star Awards on 3 September 2015 during the National Conference for Published High Impact Journals in Langkawi. This was followed by the second series of awards held on 1 November 2016 at Putrajaya.

As with previous awards in 2015 and 2016, the data used for Malaysia’s Research Star Award 2017 is based on citations of published research papers in quality international journals as indexed in Clarivate Analytics Web of Science, the world’s most trusted source of multidisciplinary citation databases  for research discovery and analytics.

The data used for Malaysia’s Research Star Award 2017 is based on the Highly Cited Papers extracted from Clarivate Analytics Essential Science Indicators from 2012 to 2016. Highly Cited Papers constitute the top 1% of all papers published worldwide in each of 22 broad fields and each year of coverage. More than 400 Highly Cited Papers published by Malaysian authors indexed between 2012 and 2016 qualified for the Award based on the above criteria. In order to identify the promising stars among these influential researchers, additional criteria using combinations of citations and the Category Normalized Citation Impact² (CNCI) was applied to these individual papers to determine the awardees. CNCI is a proprietary metric that belongs to InCites, a database by Clarivate Analytics which is widely used to evaluate institutional productivity and benchmark its output against peers worldwide.

Malaysia’s Highly Cited Papers grew more than eight-fold from a mere 18 papers in 2006 to 149 top papers in 2016. Other than particle physics and clinical medicine studies in which Malaysian researchers participate as part of a large collaborative group, researchers in Malaysia also produced many top papers in Engineering, Chemistry and Agricultural Sciences.  Many of these papers are in the fields of nanomaterials, biofuels and the use of agricultural waste. Such scholarly expertise provides a pool of top talent to support the growth of Malaysia’s national key economic areas.

On a related note, six researchers from Malaysia earned the distinction of being named amongst the world’s most influential 3,000 scientists – as determined by their fellow researchers – who have made the most significant global impact within their respective field of study based on their papers indexed in the Web of Science between 2004 and 2014. They were named by Clarivate Analytics as 2016 Highly Cited Researchers on 16 November 2016 for having published the greatest number of articles ranking among the top 1% worldwide by citations received in their respective fields in each paper’s year of publication. They received their Highly Cited Researcher certificates from Clarivate Analytics during the event.

According to Web of Science and InCites, Malaysia’s research output in 2016 (19,176), when measured by the number of published scientific papers, has grown about five-fold compared to 2006 (3,843).  Most of this growth in publication is in the top quartile (i.e. ranked in the top 25%) of journals in the world as defined in the Journal Citation Reports. In 2016, 38% of Malaysian output was in the top quartile journals contrasting with 28% in 2007. This shows that published works from Malaysian institutions are increasingly recognized and accepted by the most prestigious research journals in the world.

Note to Editors
¹ Malaysia recently announced its TN50 or Transformasi Nasional 2050 plan (National Transformation 50) with innovation as a key component. This continues from the Wawasan 2020 plan (Vision 2020) which aims to establish Malaysia as a scientific and progressive society by year 2020. The country’s growth in research output and performance is a step toward that goal.

²The Category Normalized Citation Impact (CNCI) of a paper is an unbiased indicator of impact irrespective of age, document type and subject category. The Category Normalized Citation Impact of a document is calculated by dividing the actual count of citing items by the expected citation rate for documents with the same document type, year of publication and subject area. For example, a CNCI of 3 means that a paper is three times more impactful than the average citations of all papers published worldwide in that same year and same subject category.

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