Celebrating the UP Centennial - Bahay Kubo Research

By Flor Lacanilao

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.
-- Albert Einstein

UP is celebrating its Centennial next year. What can we say about its contribution to knowledge and national progress, two major functions of a university?

The University has produced the recognized leaders of government, industry, scientific community, and other sectors of Philippine society. Some private universities would be proud of such graduates because these would attract more students. I think UP is proud of its graduates if they contributed to knowledge or national progress.

When I entered UP as a freshman in 1954, there was only one UP with the main campus in Diliman. The Philippines was second only to Japan in Asia, we are told. UP has since grown into a system of 7 constituent universities on 12 campuses, 5,000 teaching and research staff, 360 graduate programs, and 50,000 students all over the country.

Now no less than 10 countries are ahead of us in Asia, in science & technology and national progress. Is the State University partly to blame? Where has UP failed? I will review the last two decades and limit myself to some blunders in science, their consequences, and the revival of academic excellence at UP. They give some simple lessons and signs of hope to help reverse what happened to our country in the last five decades.

1. Developing capability

Leaders of developed countries have long reminded their counterparts in poor countries that the best way to development is through science and technology. "America's huge economic success comes from innovation, which is fuelled by its research enterprise. And this in turn is driven by graduate education" (1). They emphasize the sequential relations between research, science, technology, and development -- the R&D process -- where research is the basic component.

I think UP Diliman established the College of Science in 1983 along these ideas. This will be one focus of my discussions. The College objective often repeated by its first dean was to have an all-PhD faculty. The problem here is that the PhD degree, under existing conditions, merely reflects capability (promise) and does not guarantee performance (contribution to knowledge).

By 1993 over 70 PhDs were added to the faculty of UPD College of Science, making a total of 101 PhDs or half of its teaching force (College of Science General Information, 1993-1994). Most of them were products of its graduate programs. Further, the College granted over 500 advanced degrees, including 133 PhDs, from 1985 to 1994. Other major colleges of UP have greatly increased these figures, thus boosting the University’s and the country’s R&D capability during the 90s.

At the national level, the National Science Development Board established in 1958 was transformed into the National Science and Technology Authority in 1982, and elevated to the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) in 1987. The University’s graduates and staff have dominated the management of this national agency.

The DOST launched the Science and Technology Master Plan 1990-2000. Its 1991 budget doubled to P1.7 billion in 1992, went up to P2.4 billion in 1993, and to P3.2 billion in 1995 (The S&T Post, October 1995). These are other means of improving capability.

Some of our neighbor countries also launched their development programs to advance S&T. When Singapore was developing its industrial base in the ’60s and ’70s, for example, its government relied much on the country’s scientists (internationally-published researchers, not to be confused with PhDs) and focused on developing S&T.

2. Measuring performance

Meanwhile, over the last 50 years, a revolutionary indexing system for the S&T literature was being developed and refined through the initiative of Eugene Garfield, founder of the Institute for Scientific information or ISI (2). It was later enriched with the help of a few others, notably Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg of biotechnology fame. Citation indexes were issued and “led to wholly new ways of searching the literature and understanding the structure of scientific knowledge.” An example is the Science Citation Index (SCI).

The SCI introduced new ways to evaluate research. The number of publications indexed in SCI later evolved into a common indicator of research and S&T performance. Using this indicator, for example, the Scientific American ranks the Philippines in 1995 as no. 60 in the world (3).

With publications data from the same influential index, the journal Science reports in 1995 and 2005 the rapid progress of science in China and India (4, 5). And the journal Nature compares in 2004 the quality of research in 31 countries using ISI’s publication and citation data (6).

The national total of listed papers in the SCI has been widely used to assess a country’s research performance and estimate its productive scientist count. This has been widely accepted to show the state of science & technology and economic development or underdevelopment.

The database of the ISI expanded into other fields, like social sciences, arts, and humanities, leading to other ISI indexes -- SCI Expanded, Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), and Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). These major indexes of ISI have become the preferred sources of information (publications, citations, etc.) for searching the literature and measuring the research performance in all fields, not only of countries but also of universities, other institutions, and individuals.

They transformed the way researchers work. They also made it easier to define what an international refereed or peer-reviewed journal is, especially in poor and developing countries -- covered in SCI, SCIE, SSCI, or AHCI.

With this development, it has been easier to search the literature backward and forward and evaluate research performance with objective indicators. Sadly, many continue to use “reputable” or “prestigious” journal in rating publications without a useful definition of these terms.