Not seeing Mathematics in the picture, my gut feeling told me that it must have got ranked given the progress we have made so far. So I checked the QS Rankings for the subject of mathematics and yes, we were ranked at 201-250 (see below).
I informed my management colleagues and they felt that it should be highlighted by the university as well in the social media. Hence I mentioned it in one of the private university forums and they said that they will change this (so far I have not seen it). I do not think the absence of mathematics was purposely done but more probably is that less interest is taken in mathematics (which is a shame). I have no intent to make this as a big issue but such lack of interest in the progress made by our mathematical scientists can be misused by others, giving the impression that we have not progressed as much as in other sciences. On the other hand, while being ranked as such, we know ourselves that we still need better progress to move forward.
As part of the reason on why I would be surprised that we would be unranked is that there have been other studies showing that our country is progressing well in mathematics research. For instance, the paper "Mathematics Research in Association of Southeast Asian Nations Countries: A Scientometric Analysis of Patterns and Impacts" shows Malaysia is one of the four countries (the rest are Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand) that contribute most in the mathematics publications (95%) in ASEAN. In a way I was slightly surprised that we are comparable to Vietnam since Vietnam has a longer mathematical tradition associated to both French and Russian traditions (see particularly the math highly cited publications in the table below.
Some of these, as expected, are having international collaborators, which according to the paper makes our papers to be better cited. Malaysia, so it seems, are mainly having collaborators from Iran, India and Saudi Arabia (I was surprised by the third) - see the graph plot below. Uzbekistan, whose mathematical community in Malaysia is significant, seems to come fifth after USA. To digress, it was through Uzbek mathematician, Abdumalik Rakhimov (once our research fellow in the institute), that I got my Erdos number 4 (which of course does not say anything significant) - see below. Another observation is the graph density (not calculated in the paper); ours are as dense as Vietnam's but not as dense as Singapore's, showing better international diversity.
Now the question is how much of this is contribution from our university, UPM. First note that the dataset used in the above is from the period of 2006-2015. While I can't find (at the time of this writing) how mathematics contribution are distributed among say, the research universities, the distribution among broad science categories can be found here. Let us just focus on mathematics in UPM where I have done some information filtration through Scopus before this. Here is the mathematics publications affiliated with UPM from 1980-2019 (see below).
Prior to 1992, there seems to be negligible Scopus-cited mathematics publication from UPM. An appreciable increase in publications can be seen from 2000 onwards. A steep rise can be seen after 2006. It is plausible to make connections with some known events. Some notable events are (i) the formation of the institute INSPEM in April 2002; and (ii) the status of UPM as research university in October 2006. Of course, there is a multitude of factors that can be considered. We will next consider only those publications affiliated with INSPEM.
It is interesting to note that the first publication begins in 2003. It is very much plausible that there may be researchers of the institute that have published before this but without INSPEM affiliation since the institute is a new phenomenon. One can also note that from the side numbers, the number of publications for each year is lower than that for the whole of UPM. Until 2016, the percentage of INSPEM publication relative to UPM total math publication hovers between 42-60%. It is to be noted that researchers have the freedom to put down the INSPEM affiliation or not (even if the research grant is parked at the institute) in their papers. There is also the policy that the publications from the institute will still be counted at the various faculties. While this can be said as a disadvantage, the institute has always given the freedom to the researchers though we recommended to them to include the institute affiliation in their publications. The percentage of INSPEM publications dropped to around 30% beginning 2017. We are not quite sure why this is so but I have argued before that certainly this coincides with the period of reduced fundings and shrinkage of the number of staff.
Having observed the above, it is only natural for the institute to study whatever weaknesses and threats there are to the institute. This is the more reason why we at the institute should consolidate our strength and resources to ensure the survival of the institute. We have already heard the news of possible restructuring of the institute, which undoubtedly has brought the morale down and makes it even more difficult for us to progress. Recent setting of the KPIs has also worsened the situation for the institute mainly because the KPI setting is done without differentiating the research culture of each discipline. It is widely known that mathematics has modest publication rates, which is at best is two or lower per year - see the issued statement of American Mathematical Society over here. Another study of American mathematicians in fact revealed that it is even lower than one per year (see figure below).
Similarly for citations, the citation culture is different in mathematics, often lower than other sciences (and hence also for other indicators that depend on citations like h-index) - see the following study by International Mathematical Union and the following discussion (pg 32-34) in European Mathematical Society Newsletter. It would be terribly unjust to ignore these differences. It will be no surprise then by setting the KPI of publication rate at five papers per year (as main author), for instance, scares everyone away from being a member of the institute. Had it been KPIs being merely targets and unrelated to salary movement or promotion assessments, it would have been more acceptable. Unfortunately, this is usually not the case and most people see KPIs in the context of threats. The usual response would be fight or flight.
Setting a blanket KPI would be an easy route for university administrators to monitor progress, but one that will come at a price. Unrealistic KPIs would invite unethical approaches by researchers that often may embarrass the universities themselves (see Retraction Watch posts on Malaysia). At best, researchers will show indifference towards to the vision and goals of the university. Some may ask why should the university allow different treatments for a particular discipline. Why should we be considered 'special', as someone asked. Then one can respond back with the same reasoning of why should any ranking agencies be interested in ranking of universities by subjects. It is just a simple acknowledgement of the fact that there are research cultural differences one can't just ignore. I understand the fact the university wishes to progress and not be contented with present achievements. I believe everyone in their right mind, wants to be so. That is why I suggest that any progress be done realistically and incrementally based on past achievements and present resources. We could look to the subject ranking for mathematics as a guide. For instance, for the publication KPI that one needs to set is perhaps the average number of publications of a mathematician from the bracket of top 151-200 universities, since we have already being ranked at top 201-250. Now the criteria for the QS ranking was based mainly on citations and overall reputation and not publication rate, but with some efforts, we can get the average number of publications from Scopus dataset. Below are some breakdowns of the ranking indicators used.
The first column is the overall reputation, the second is citations per paper and the third is h-index citations. We can immediately see that we really need to work on the citations (and I don't mean manipulatively). One should now work on publishing our research materials in journals where the relevant community flocks to (and this does not necessarily means Q1 and Q2 journals as some would like to think). Each journal tends to have a particular following and we can look for those respectable ones where our research output would be most read by, particularly those which are more specialised. There are other 'strategies' that one could also use; for instance uploading preprints to some repository like the arXiv, making our work more visible (and hence also open to more critics). We can even go to more details; within the mathematics subfields, which are the ones more identifiable with our institute, build reputation around it. Here is a snapshot of the mathematical subfields found visible for Malaysia in 2017-2018 given by Scimago.
Let me just end this post with a saying that I have read elsewhere: as the university gets more critical with our achievements, one should also be equally critical with the critieria that we have been measured against. One can be easily deluded by 'numbers' that appears objective, but it is what do these numbers actually mean, which is the subjective part. Instead of being preoccupied with such numbers, we should be more concerned with the science that we grow. Deep within us, we know ourselves whether we are doing alright or not.
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