Global Research Report South and Southeast AsiaProfessor Jonathan Adams, David Pendlebury, Gordon Rogers Moed, 2016) has drawn attention to the need to interpret national scientometric indicators in the context of their evolving research development. This region contains very different stages of research development. For Singapore, international collaboration is just a part of national strategy: the outcome of researchers elsewhere collaborating with scientists in world leading institutions. For the smaller ASEAN nations, international collaboration forms the bulk of their high-performance research activity as their domestic research base builds up.Table 1. Descriptive statistics by country, ranked by annual publication output. CNCI is an index of research publication impact (where world average = 1.0, see text) and is expressed as gross (for the country as a whole) and domestic (for publications with only national authors)SourceWorld Bank 2017UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2017Web of Science average for 2014-18Population ThousandsGDP current $US millionGERD as % GDPResearchers per million populationPublication outputCNCI grossCNCI domesticLaos 7,169 18,131 0.04 16 1179 1.23 0.44Myanmar 54,045 71,215 0.16 15 203 2.13 0.61Brunei 433 13,567 0.04 283 1 207 1.30 0.67Cambodia 16,486 24,572 0.12 30 300 1.34 0.45Sri Lanka 21,323 88,901 0.11 107 931 1.86 0.44Philippines 108,117 330,910 0.14 188 11,438 1.46 0.39Bangladesh 163,046 274,025 n/a n/a 2,092 1.27 0.55Indonesia 270,626 1,042,173 0.08 89 12,462 1.19 0.52Vietnam 96,462 244,948 0.44 672 3,766 1.20 0.67Thailand 69,626 504,993 0.78 1,210 8,261 0.95 0.56Pakistan 216,565 312,570 0.25 294 10,112 1.03 0.56Malaysia 31,950 354,348 1.30 2,274 11,924 1.06 0.76Singapore 5,804 364,157 2.16 6,730 13,916 1.64 1.28India 1,366,420 2,726,323 0.62 216 66,400 0.86 0.68GDP = gross domestic product, GERD = gross expenditure on research and development CNCI = average category normalised citation impact 1= Researcher data for these countries is from sources more than five years old5Research capacity Research activity in South and East Asia has grown rapidly since 2000. From an annual regional total of about 12,000 papers (articles and reviews), output has risen ten-fold and now accounts for more than 8% of global publications every year.120,00090,00060,00030,0008.0%6.0%4.0%2.0%1981 1983 1985 1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011 2013 2015 2017 2019Regional share of world output (%)Annual count of papers for regionFigure 1. Regional growth of research in S the balance of papers cited less often than world average; the height and position of the peak of the curve; the balance of papers cited more often than world average; and the proportion of papers that are in the most highly-cited categories more than four and more than eight times world average. For detailed methodology see text.Impact Profiles display the distribution of CNCI values of journal papers