The 2021 Award evaluation process is carried out according to regulations, including checking application conditions; consult experts to review; evaluated at the Foundation’s Scientific Council (OSC) and the Award Council. On April 29, 2021, the Prize Council for 2021 met to evaluate and select applications. However, after more than 4 hours of discussion and voting, the Award Council decided not to recommend awarding the nominations. On May 13, 2021, the Minister of Science and Technology approved this proposal. Too few good records? Professor Ngo Viet Trung, Chairman of the Award Council, said that this year, although the number of applications for evaluation and selection was similar to previous years, after the initial review, there were only 2 scientific activities in Earth Science and Science. Environmental and Agricultural Biology nominate 2 entries for the Main Prize and 2 for the Junior Award for consideration at the Awards Panel. This year’s nominations are all in the experimental field, related to issues of concern to scientists around the world. It is the work of Assoc.Prof.Dr. Ngo Duc Thanh, Dr. Bui Minh Tuan on climate change in rain, and the work on the use of antibiotic substitutes in aquaculture by Dr. Do Huu Hoang, a project on the technical system of growing chrysanthemums on a large scale by Dr. Hoang Thanh Tung. Will young scientists have more opportunities at the Ta Quang Buu Prize? Prof. Nguyen Huu Duc, Chairman of the Physics Council, said that although this year the Science Council also received a number of applications, including works published in journals with IF coefficients, but did not nominate any works. to the Awards Committee. Explaining this, Prof. Duc said the reason is that most of these works have only been published about half a year ago, while the Physics Council thinks that it is necessary to evaluate the works at an international level, through by number of citations. “So the Physics committee members agreed to give it another year to have a more accurate assessment of the publication quality with these works.” In the Science Council in Mathematics, there are also two nominations that, according to Prof. Ngo Viet Trung, are of sufficient quality. However, at the time of voting, both of these applications did not receive 2/3 of the votes to be nominated to the Award Council. This may have caused a negative resonance if people did not understand the situation of this year “- Professor Trung shared. “However, I confirm that no works have been awarded the award that does not fully reflect the development reality of the country’s science and technology.” According to Professor Ngo Viet Trung, looking at the quality of international publication of basic science today, the number of articles in leading journals has increased markedly and the quality is much better than the time when there was a Ta Quang Buu Award. “However, each year the quantity and quality of applications for awarding the Prize depends on many other factors such as the self-nomination of scientists or the nomination of research and training organizations. create. Scientists are afraid to nominate themselves for the prize, while many agencies are not interested in nominating outstanding works. In addition, awarding a prize to an individual or to a work also limits nominations because scientific achievements are often confirmed through a cluster of works and through the cooperation of many scientists. Professor Ngo Viet Trung also said that it is important that the quality of the award is guaranteed. “It’s normal for an award not to be given by anyone. The Board of Directors has worked very seriously, not for the sake of having a prize but trying to award it, which will affect the prestige of the award. For example, China’s highest national award for science and technology (worth about $750,000) has gone without a prize twice, Mr. Trung cited. In particular, in 2015, there was no award, but China had a Nobel Prize in Medicine right before the national award. Young scientists need to be taken care of The 2021 season has passed, but according to Prof. Ngo Viet Trung, there are contents that the Foundation needs to discuss to draw lessons for the following years, so that the award can achieve the purpose of promoting research in basic science and technology. encourage young researchers. He also expressed the view that “need to pay more attention to young scientists”. “I and other members are trying to propose to the Ministry of Science and Technology so that each industry has a young award and the young award recipient will be a typical scientist for his or her specialty.” Prof. Nguyen Huu Duc also expressed his support that next year the regulations should change a bit, such as increasing the number of young prizes, and some more detailed award criteria. “Currently, the criteria of the award are heavy on hard indexes such as the influence of magazines, and the ability to deeply analyze the value of each work still has some shortcomings. Therefore, in my opinion, it is necessary to balance the hard criteria with the specific value and unique points of the work, plus expert opinion, public opinion because there are works published in ordinary journals but very difficult. excellent”. Ta Quang Buu Prize is an annual award of the Ministry of Science and Technology to encourage and honor scientists who play a key role in excellent scientific works, carried out in Vietnam, and published on the Internet. prestigious international scientific journals in the field of natural sciences and engineering. The award has been implemented since 2013, in the past 7 years, it has received more than 360 applications, awarded 16 main prizes and 4 awards for young scientists.

Only 19.1% of scientific journals are digitized This is the third time the Vcgate team has announced this result (the previous two times were in 2016 and 2018). However, this is the first time the team has evaluated the impact factor (IF) and H-index (cumulative influence) according to international practices. In 2020, there are 83 journals to be considered for inclusion in the Vcgate system and evaluated. Regarding the influence index calculated through the number of citations in 2020 of articles published in 5 years (2015-2019), there are 72/83 journals having an impact index. In which, 42 journals have an index of IF > 0.1; 12 journals have IF > 0.5 and 6 journals have IF > 1.0. Citations are collected from Google Scholar sources, so are often higher than the total number of citations from Web of Science and Scopus sources. The results show that, in addition to journals with international elements, a number of Vietnamese scientific journals are published entirely by internal resources, but have received a very encouraging IF index. Source Vcgate However, in general, the quality of our journals is still inadequate, far from the final group of Q4 international journals. In addition, this year Vcgate also announced the results of the H-index survey of magazines. This index evaluates the degree of integration between publication productivity (quantity) and quality (citation count). Accordingly, the Journal of Advances in Natural Sciences: Nanoscience and Nanotechnology of the Vietnam Academy of Sciences has the highest index (H-index = 53). Assessing the general picture for Vietnamese scientific journals, the Vcgate team found that Vietnam currently has over 600 scientific journals (only in the journal system scored by the State Council of Professors, there are more than 600 scientific journals). 400 journals), of which only 1 journal is indexed in the SCIE (Science Citation Index Expansed) database and 8 journals are included in the ESCI (Emerging Sources Citation Index) of the Web of Sciences; 10 Scopus journals and 18 journals are indexed in the ACI (Asean Citation Index) database. These are very modest numbers compared to other countries in Southeast Asia. According to GS. Nguyen Huu Duc, Vietnamese scientific journals also do not follow international practices, from format to presentation. As for the standard, which is basically only interested in the form of ACI, Vietnam has only passed 18 journals. The editorial board has not yet been able to diversify geographically, the way in which references are presented, the protocol of the minutes, etc., have not been accepted. In the current digitization context, there are only about 115/600 journals published online (only about 19.1%), of which only 83 journals have relatively standardized websites, compatible with other institutions. international data and indexed in the Vcgate system is a very unexpected and sad result. The Vcgate system has been in operation for nearly 5 years, promoting, encouraging and supporting magazines a lot, but hardly make any changes, don’t know the reason for the resistance. GS. Nguyen Huu Duc also said that not digitizing will make magazines self-limiting readers to find them. “Without readers, that means there will be no citations and thus, the journal’s influence on the scientific community is very low,” Prof. Huu Duc said. The process of evaluating journals by the State Council of Professors is too simple and subjective GS. Nguyen Huu Duc said, while the management of productivity and quality of international publications of Vietnamese scientists and S&T organizations can be done very quickly and conveniently through the Web of Science’s database and /or Scopus, statistics and management of publications published in the country cannot be done. How much does the state spend on research, but it is very difficult to manage and analyze accurately and effectively. The list of journals of the State Council of Professors has more than 400 journals, but the selection and quality assessment is still simple, qualitative and subjective, without criteria and selection process. Prof. Nguyen Huu Duc analyzed, the format and presentation format of many scientific journals in Vietnam are arbitrary, inconsistent and inconsistent with international practices. In particular, we do not have a policy to encourage the evaluation of journal quality by quantitative and specific criteria. GS. Nguyen Huu Duc said that only the Ta Quang Buu Prize and the Nafosted Foundation are interested in important factors of the quality of research works through the assessment of two important indicators, namely the prestige of the scientific journal. having high IF index and having the influence of articles of (with high citation index) If the domestic scientific journals have low IF index, the quality is not properly evaluated, it will also affect the quality of the articles. evaluate the quality of the article in particular and the results honoring scientists in general. Works published in scientific journals are the main database and information to evaluate the productivity and quality of scientific research of individuals and organizations, a measure to recognize titles and scientific awards, staff evaluation criteria… If we don’t pay attention to this, we can only evaluate based on the quality of current journals, the consequences will be immeasurable. Therefore, GS. Nguyen Huu Duc recommended that it is necessary to improve the standardization and digitization of the system of Vietnamese scientific journals, to develop a complete system of Vietnamese citation database, to develop a set of criteria and to use database of the citation system to evaluate the quality of journals.