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oor analytical capacity among Indonesian researchers is to blame for the lack of academic papers published in international journals. Poor English aggravates the problem.

Enny Sudarmonowati, a research trainer with the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), said Indonesian writers should equip themselves with skills in interpreting research findings.

In addition, they must produce excellent scientific papers in English that can be published in international journals.

“It seems a poor analytical capacity and weak writing affects our scientists ability to produce quality scientific papers. As the result, few researchers have papers published in international journals,” Enny told journalists in Bogor on Friday.

She said on the sidelines of a workshop, “Increased Acceptance in Referred International Scientific Journal”, which marked the launch of LIPI’s scientific paper writing guidelines.

Currently, Indonesia has around 38,000 researchers, comprising 1,300 researchers from LIPI; 7,997 researchers from research and development agencies in ministries and other non-ministry institutions; and the remainder are researchers at universities and other organizations.

As of November, as many as 177 Indonesian journals have been accredited as scientific journals, 22 of which belong to LIPI.

Meanwhile, 150 journals in the country have received accreditation from the Education and Culture Ministry’s directorate general of higher education (DIKTI).

Despite the availability of local journals to publish scientific works by researchers in the country, Enny said that many Indonesian researchers produced substandard scientific papers, impeding their efforts to be published in international journals.

“A poor critical thinking capacity [...] is one of the weaknesses many local authors deal with,” she said, adding that reading habits was also a problem.

Speaking to journalists, Enny said that she had once found a scientific paper published in a national journal that only had four book references.

She added that LIPI had warned several publications that had published substandard scientific work.

During the workshop, participants had the opportunity to develop scientific paper skills, ranging from developing a hypothesis, knowledge of literature and proposal writing.

LIPI chairman Lukman Hakim said the workshop hoped to equip the participating researchers with an appropriate strategy to develop high quality scientific papers.

“Perhaps the most important task before conducting research and writing is that they understand the scientific ethics that they should follow because it is often the measurement of their professionalism,” he said.

About 40,000 scientific international journals are currently available in the world today. Compared to other countries in the region, such as Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, Indonesia has under-performed in a number of cited publications.

Fred T. Davies, a scientist from Texas A & M University’s School of Horticultural Sciences in Texas, US, said many researchers were trapped by false myths so they could not perform well in publishing their works in refereed journals.

One of the myths says: “Scientific writing is easy for scientists.”

Davies said the opposite. It needs skill.

“It does not matter how well you write, which is incredibly important. You must do a good job on the structure: Putting together the research, the methodology and the hypothesis as a proposal and having [the work] critiqued by colleagues — and even sending it out to other people and institutes to also criticize — this will really enhance the quality of what you are trying to do,” Davies said, adding that such a critique could also impact positively on the authors as scientists.