AUTHOR
*Heng Kimkong is a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at Cambodia Development Center, an Australia Awards scholar pursuing a PhD in Education at the University of Queensland and a co-founder of Cambodian Education Forum.
ABOUT Commentary
Numerous studies have indicated that research capacity of Cambodian universities and their academics are underdeveloped not only comparing to the developed countries but also to the fellow ASEAN member states. While the Scopus-indexed publications showed that Thailand with 143,507 publications ranked fourth and Vietnam with 53,907 publications ranked sixth in the region, Cambodia was ranked 8th out of the 10 Southeast Asian countries, slightly leading Myanmar and Laos. Promoting academic research activities in Cambodia is particularly challenging. Not only is there a distinct lack of a strong research culture, but there is also limited public interest in research. This is not to mention the inadequacy of technical, financial and intellectual resources needed to support research, both applied and academic research.
