Aryati Bakri

Scientometric assessment of engineering in Malaysians universities

There is a world trend for Research Performance Evaluation (RPE), developing of new scientometric indices and examining of their application. Consequently, concerns and anomalies arise about the convergent validity and reliability of these indices for the decision making purposes. This is especially prevalent in the region/countries/disciplines having less or emerging trends of publishing and getting citations. The present scientometric study addresses usefulness of the most noted metric h-index along with other selected indicators in the field of Engineering in Malaysians universities. To understand, the role of this metric if any, we examined the functional correlation, predictive value and its relationship with national assessment criteria. Results report that this indicator has good potential to work alone, ease in use and robust to get a broader snapshot for positioning and performance evaluation. However, for better decision making purpose, this can be used for broader contextual peer assessment process along with other indicators. Its validity is further checked with two size independent institutional h-indices: hG–H and hm.

Effects of Persuasive Designed Courseware on Children with Learning Difficulties in Learning Malay Language Subject.

The effects of courseware learning for children with learning difficulties have been studied over the years. Educational courseware is very common nowadays as a teaching tool for children’s early education. However, most of the coursewares are designed for children with normal learning ability. Special children who face difficulty in the learning process are unable to utilize the courseware effectively due to their learning problems. This paper presents findings from a study that investigated the effects of persuasive designed mobile courseware on children with learning difficulties compared to traditional teaching method. Persuasive design aims to change their behaviour in using the courseware by attracting them to continuously utilize the courseware in the learning process. Various persuasive design principles are being implemented in the courseware. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of persuasive design implemented in the courseware towards children with learning difficulties. The subject focus in this study is Malay language subject which is the national language of Malaysia. This research aims to assist the educators and parents in teaching special children to improve their learning progress from time to time.

Evaluation of new research performance indices at the researcher level

Various new performance evaluation indices for impact have been proposed and studied in various contexts. This study carried out a quantitative evaluation of the case of Malaysian engineering researchers at the micro level using a scientometric approach. In order to understand the behavior of new developments, a comparative performance evaluation is carried out of h-index, a set of h-type indices along with publication and citation metrics. Findings are compared with earlier major studies. We looked for institutional h-index and researchers’ h-index scores and did not find any relationship. Exploratory Factor Analysis is employed to examine the valid categorization and to study the underlying dimensions of the studied metrics and indices. The inter-correlation among h-index, its variants, and traditional metrics is probed in detail. The h, q and g-indices along with publication and citation hold the position on ‘quantity of the productive core’, while the R index showed equal loading on both cores. For th...Various new performance evaluation indices for impact have been proposed and studied in various contexts. This study carried out a quantitative evaluation of the case of Malaysian engineering researchers at the micro level using a scientometric approach. In order to understand the behavior of new developments, a comparative performance evaluation is carried out of h-index, a set of h-type indices along with publication and citation metrics. Findings are compared with earlier major studies. We looked for institutional h-index and researchers’ h-index scores and did not find any relationship. Exploratory Factor Analysis is employed to examine the valid categorization and to study the underlying dimensions of the studied metrics and indices. The inter-correlation among h-index, its variants, and traditional metrics is probed in detail. The h, q and g-indices along with publication and citation hold the position on ‘quantity of the productive core’, while the R index showed equal loading on both cores. For the case of Malaysian engineering researchers, two conspicuous findings are observed about the total citation and g-index. These have association with the first component named as ‘quantity of the productive core.’ Our findings strengthen the point that citation count has a strong association with the ‘quantity of the productive core’ and cannot be used as sole impact evaluation measure.

The Study of Co-occurrences Index’s Keywords for Malaysian Publications

Keywords become more crucial in searching any information either in a research database, website or in social media. Another usage of keywords is to identify the pattern for a potential subject area with manipulated elements from the bibliometric information via classification or clustering. There are number of studies were done previously in classification whether in local or international. However, the study regarding clustering was identified as limited to here in Malaysia. Therefore, the intention of this paper is to fill the gap which and identify the pattern for a potential subject area which manipulated one of bibliometric element namely as index’s keywords. The approach that was used to obtain the pattern is bibliomining. In our research, we used one promising application namely Vosviewer to achieve our research objective. Data from Scopus databases from 1995 to 2015 with a total of 46,959 documents can be used after data cleaning. We managed to get 4 clusters to represent some theme in our analysis and output. These might be beneficial to management and other researchers to maneuver the research direction and gives an idea which subject area needs to be focused on and which subject area needs new research.