In his recent education column in the
Philippine Star, noted Filipino educator Isagani R. Cruz emphasized the need for Philippine universities to improve the journals they publish. He said: “Because we live in an academic world of learned journals (more than a third of which are now online, by the way), we have to follow the standards required of the 16,000 journals listed by Thomson Reuters ISI or the 18,000 journals listed by Scopus. Otherwise, we will belong to the 25,000 other journals not taken seriously enough by scholars around the world to read them, much less cite them.”
In a reaction paper to this call for Philippine universities to step up on academic research, however, Dr. Flor Lacanilao, a retired Filipino professor of marine science who has gone into a crusade to improve Philippine research in science, argues that Dr. Cruz missed the importance of internationally accepted criteria in evaluating performance and deciding institutional leadership or assigning functions. “Our usual practice is to rely on known personalities that we often refer to as scholars and specialists,” he says. But, he asks, will their “claims stand the test of established international standards, or simply the accepted measures of performance?”
Read their contrasting viewpoints in the Forum's Education and Teaching section now!
