Until the mid-seventies, the scientific productivity of the Philippines was comparable to that of Thailand and Malaysia and a little better over Indonesia. More than 40 years later, the overall productivity of Filipino scientists (i.e. those working in the Philippines) has gone far below the remarkable outputs of Thailand and Malaysia. As of the last three years, even Indonesia has outperformed the Philippines.
This is based on the data from the Science Citation Index (SCI). As their website describes, every journal included in the Thomson Scientific’s ISI Science Citation Index ExpandedTM has met the high standards of an objective evaluation process that eliminates clutter and excess and delivers data that is accurate, meaningful and timely. The SCI has been accepted worldwide as the standard index of peer-reviewed and valid scientific reports.
The number of publications from the Philippines in this database was retrieved along with neighboring countries that started out close. Other countries in the Southeast Asian region had either too high (e.g. Singapore) or too low (e.g. Brunei) output to merit a meaningful comparison. The retrieved data were processed in a spreadsheet and herein presented in a comprehensive graph.
As summarized in the figure above, the period from around 1980 to 1995 is marked by stagnation and lack of productive scientific activity. This is one and a half decade of lethargy while Thailand and Malaysia were seemingly laying groundwork for a future upsurge in scientific productivity. Upward trend only becomes visible from year 2000 onwards. Whether this increase means a signal for a future scientific revolution or not is a matter of speculation. What is clear though is that the progress of science in the Philippines has been very slow based on accepted international metric standard for scientific productivity.
This should be taken as a challenge by local Filipino scientists. While we produce many talented graduate students, most are going abroad for further training and long-term job. The government should reconsider it’s priorities and approaches in dealing with Science and Technology issues and focus on how to prevent this brain drain; which, when left unabated, is sure to plunge the country further down from where it is now.
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