I’ll skip all the Chinese, but I’m sure it makes sense to you.

Here, we provide the data for two rankings. Take, for instance, Times Higher Education Ranking. They have this weighted impact of teaching, research, citations, international outlook, and industry outcome. In that, big chunks are provided by Scopus.

Look at the QS World University Ranking. We provide all the citations, so it’s 20 percent. They also use the Scopus database to find the right people to write for the academic reputation. This is kind of a questionnaire. Weiwei’s going to tell you about the very specific ranking we support here in Taiwan.

Launch event.

Yep. We don’t do teaching performance. We don’t have that information.

It’s a bit of a proxy. [laughs]

I think it’s both.

Certainly, it’s the social media as well.

It’s called Plum Analytics.

That’s a good one.

No, but certainly the social media is there, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I don’t know all the blogs. That might be more difficult to get a good overview.

I can double-check.

Exactly, and that’s where most of the discussion takes place.

We’re actually thinking very hard to develop better metrics, also because we get this demand from the universities and the funders. An easy one is economic impact. We can make this link between articles and patents.

No, actually those are articles which are...

Yeah, but here the one is mostly the articles which are published by, say, a researcher at a university and a researcher in industry.

That’s academic-corporate collaboration. That’s are easy. For instance, it would also be very interesting for you do research and at some point -- say, in environmental studies -- you shape a new environmental policy.

It’s reflected in the legislation. We’re trying to explore that, but it’s very tricky to really follow that path in a way and then really link policy with research.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs?

Perfect.

It’s a start, and this implies that your policies are based on scientific evidence. [laughs]

That’s not always the case in all countries, right? [laughs]

Very good. How is Taiwan doing? We have all the data compared to other countries. Taiwan is in the top 20. It’s number 20.

Exactly. You’re very, very close. Here, we have another graph where you see an interesting correlation. Here again, you see the field-weighted citation impact versus international collaboration.

Countries like Switzerland and my own country the Netherlands, we have loads of international collaboration, of course. We are a bit smaller, so that also forces you. Taiwan is not that huge, either. You see that they do very well within the impact as well.

One advice that I would also give when I meet a university president, I say, "Can you stimulate international collaboration?" It seems to be really...

Yeah.

For master’s level?

You think the language is really the bottleneck?

Not our mother tongues, either.

Absolutely, but a bit also cultural factors. I lived in Japan and I go there a lot. Actually, the number of Japanese scientists willing to go abroad is going down.

Here, we compare Taiwan to other countries in output. Taiwan is stable. It’s the green one with the green arrow. The one that really jumps out here is, of course, China. Here you see the international collaboration. Of course, Hong Kong and Singapore do very well there. All the countries are more or less grouped together. A positive is that Taiwan is going up a bit.

You see the same kind of clustering for the impact. Again, Singapore and Hong Kong are together, and then all the other countries are more or less at the same level. The only thing that really changed over time is China. That was far below the world average already in 2008 and is now on par with the world, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan.

Yeah, but this is a quality measurement.

You often see it...

Yeah. We have lots of detailed data. This is at the university level, just to say that we have that as well if you’re interested. If you want to look at your favorite university, we have that.

Sorry, we don’t have your junior high in here.

We also mapped out Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy. Maybe Weiwei wants to say something about this. I see something upside down.

Astronomy.

Yeah, but they don’t publish much about it.

My background’s in astronomy, so I’m sorry, I...

Before we talk about your astrological sign.

[laughs] I thought I would bring a Dutch example. We worked with the Dutch government. Essentially, they say, "We want to live in this knowledge economy and to enter our societal challenges, for instance, around affordable food or sustainable food production." The Netherlands is the number one food producer in the world producer in the world after the US, just as an example.

It’s this mix of technology and innovation policies. You see here how the Netherlands is doing compared to the other European countries. Again, pretty good in quality. Denmark is a little higher, unfortunately. Just in the middle as output, because we’re a mid-sized country or small, whatever you want to look at it. We cannot compete with Germany.

We looked at specific top technologies and we really zoomed in to very detailed ones. What jumped out is that the Netherlands does pretty well in the life sciences, for instance, stem cell technologies.

Exactly. What also jumped out is, for instance, microreactors. This is more chemical technology. Imaging technologies and optical, mechanical engineering solutions.

Then we see, "Who exactly is doing that research?" You see an example here for nanotechnology. This is at the technical university of Delft and Twente. This you see the number of publications and, again, the impacts and who would be their competitors abroad. MIT, CIT, and CRS and what is their quality?

What will jump out in this whole list is this ASML, which is a company, very big in the Netherlands, but also very active here in Taiwan. I think there are thousands of people working for ASML here in Taiwan as well.