Rapid Increase of International Science Articles by Korean University

The Korean rank of Korea in the number of the Science citation index (SCI) appears to have rapidly increased.

According to the SCI data, which is made by the US Ministry of Education and Human Resources and Institute for Scientific Information, Seoul National University, Yonsei University, and Korea University last year ranked at 55, 222, and 333 respectively.

The national rank of Korea remains 16 but the number of articles had increased from 10,918 in 1999 to 12,013 last year.

The institutions counted over 100 articles which included 30 universities, 6 government owned institutions, and 3 private industries. For the number of articles per researcher including professors and graduate students, Pohang University of Science and Technology tops Korea with 0.364, followed by Seoul National University’s 0.321 and Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology’s 0.27.

For the number of articles per a professor, KAIST ranked the top in Korea with 3.785, followed by Kwangju Institute of Science and Technology’s 2.984 and Pohang University of Science and Technology’s 2.929. Hallym University was revealed as top in the number of articles per a graduate student. The graduate students of Hallym presented 0.547 article per student, running ahead of Pohang University’s 0.416 and Ulsan University’s 0.391.

However, even when the number of Korean articles in SCI has been rapidly increased by the effect of `Brain Korea 21 (BK21),` the number of reference still remains very low. Therefore, the increase of the quality is still on demand.

Sung Ha-Woon hawoo@donga.com