Editor's note: We received the following email from former University of the Philippines in the Visayas Chancellor Flor Lacanilao. We are posting this in view of its timeliness and newsworthiness regarding the topic of U.P.'s heroic attempts to buttres its international standings in research:
"Sharing my posted comment on the article in today's Inquirer (copied below) about university rankings:
The only way to start improving education in the country is to appoint people properly trained for the job. And the easiest way to find out if one has made any major contributions to one's field is with the ISI data base called Web of Knowledge. You can get nearly the same information (published papers and citations) from Google Scholar, by counting only those published in peer-reviewed international journals -- those covered in Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Citation Index.
You will be surpised to learn that nearly all of those running our education institutions, including our major universities like the four mentioned in this article, lack such publications. That is, they are not properly trained or have not made any major contributions to their fields."
Read the rest here.
