Reflections on the Human Condition - Api-fellowships.org

208 SESSION III
The main purpose of this project is to study the
development of medicinal plant in Thailand. The specific
objectives of the study are:
1.
2.
3.
To study the growth of research document and
research institutions that participated in developing
of medicinal plants in the year 1998-2002.
To identify the major subjects on the medicinal
herbs research published in the year 1998-2002.
To assess the synergism between researches and the
policy that be drafted for developing of medicinal
plants.
This project focused on research activities that are learning
profile and structure of medicinal herb researches in
1998-2002 in Thailand. Those purposes allow assessing
the direction of the medicinal herb research on the
period. The reason why we choose that period was we
found that in Indonesia publication relating to herbal
medicine increased when economy crisis hit this country
on the middle of 1997. So we wanted to look the trend
of research on Thai herbal medicine at the same period
and the trend for five years onward.
Knowing the direction of the research is a way to know
the effectiveness of program. By studying the previous
researches we could observe the direction of the
researches. Furthermore in developing countries there
is a limitation of research budget and expert. So it is
important to investigate the direction of research of a
discipline and compare to the program.
Bibliometrics is an appropriate method to study the
development of medicinal plant from quantitative
perspective. It is a quantitative method to measure
the growth of science based on scientific publication
published in a period of time. (Ding, Chowdhury, and
Foo, 2000)
Co-word analysis is an important subset of bibliometrics.
It analyzes the co-occurrences of keywords in research
documents on a subject. In information sciences area,
keywords of a document are important subject. They
are not only for recognizing a document in literature
retrieval but also carry and represent concept and
idea that contained in a document. Co-word analysis
provides an immediate picture of the actual content
of research topics dealt with in the literature. (Chen,
2003; Ding, Chowdhury, and Foo: 2000)
Many researchers from any disciplines used Bibliometrics
method for some purposes such as to measure the
growth of disciplines, to investigate the researcher and
institution performance and to evaluate the synergism
Ref lections on the Human Condition: Change, Conflict and Modernity
The Work of the 2004/2005 API Fellows
between research and program. The method has applied
on any research fields such as medicine, information
sciences, anthropology, chemistry and so on. (Arunchalam
and Gunasekaran: 2001; Butler, Bourke, Biglia: 1997;
Ding, Chowdhury, Foo: 2000)
METHODOLOGY
This study used two techniques i.e. Bibliometrics and
in-depth interview. Bibliometrics was done toward the
research reports in the discipline of medicinal plants
published on scientific journals in the period of 1998-
2002. The period allows a country produced a number
of publications sufficient for statistical analysis.
This research did not cover the non-publication scientific
document such as dissertation, thesis, and internal
research report. Although those kinds of document are
the important sources for studying the development of
science, especially well supervised theses and dissertation;
however, it would need much time and budget to
collect unpublished document from any universities
and institutions both government and private.
This study used articles published by Thai and foreign
researchers on scientific journals. The list of articles is
obtained from several resources i.e. Thai Documentation
Centre, who has collection of Thai scientific publication
including medicinal plant, CSA database, SCI (Science
Citation Index) database, SSCI (Social Science Citation
Index) database and AHCI (Art and Human Citation
Index) database. Articles also were collected from
scientific journals in some faculties and universities
libraries in Bangkok and Chiang Mai in order to have
comprehensive source of data.
In-depth interview and literatures study were also
carried out to collect the information about the policy
on medicinal plant research in Thailand. The informants
were researchers in the field related to medicinal
plant from Chulalongkorn University, Chiang Mai
University, Prince of Songkhla University and Rangsit
University, and the government employees in Ministry
of Public Health.
Data Collection
The number of journal articles published in 1998-2002
on local and international scientific journal was 342
articles. In case of local journal, we collected all articles
not only written in English but also in Thai. All journal
articles written in Thai have abstract in English. Then
we calculated the number of researches, the rank of the
institutions and the rank of researchers.