Being a lecturer is about educating, conducting research, and carrying out community service. A lecture is required to be able to become a good researcher that the research is novel, can foster technology, and can cope with issues. A researcher is responsible for undertaking research and publishing it to public through scientific journals.
The aforementioned paragraph was uttered by a journal assessor of Directorate of Higher Education (DIKTI) Prof. Ir. Wasmen Manalu, Ph.D. He acted as a speaker of ‘Writing Clinic and Scientific Journal Writing’ on Thursday (6/10) at director meeting hall of Graduate School of Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta (UMY). The event was conducted by Journal Government and Politics (JPG) controlled by Master of Government Studies of UMY collaborating with Business and Bureaucracy Journal (JBB) of UI.
Prof. Wasmen Manalu stated that the foremost duty of a researcher is not collecting but publishing their research. He has to share their findings to public to be assessed and criticized so that public can use it as a reference. A researcher has not accomplished his research yet if he has not registered in scientific journals. “The duty of a researcher is dedicating himself to discovering truth to evolve sciences, technology, and innovation for the existence and prosperity of human beings,” he argued.
Furthermore, Prof. Wasmen discuss periodic scientific journal that is a legitimate agency having several steps namely registration, certification, dissemination, archiving, and publication of journals. “The registration to accredited journals essentially aims at publishing recent scientific articles to broaden knowledge, enhancing the writers’ achievement, lifting agency reputation as well as satisfaction, and improving competitiveness of a notion,” he asserted.
Talking about competitiveness of a nation, the number of published journals in Indonesia indexed in Scopus is very low that Indonesia is in the 11th position in Asia and the 57th position in the world. The greatest number of published journals is 5,499 journals. “If it is compared to the number of Indonesian citizens, lecturers, and researchers, the number of published journals can be much greater. It might be caused by lack of researchers’ awareness of publishing their research in national and international level. Besides, their research also should be fruitful for the community becoming the research participants,” he affirmed.
Additionally, Director of Graduate School of UMY Dr. Achmad Nurmandi conveyed that editors frequently run out of articles to be edited and published. In line with Prof. Wasmen, he asserted that lack of lecturers’ interest in writing articles drives editors gather attractive and novel articles by themselves. “It may take long time since they ought to be thorough and comprehend well in reading research articles so that the published journal articles will be valuable for public,” he contended. Therefore, both Prof. Wasmen and Dr. Nurmandi encourage Indonesian lecturers and researches to be more active in conducting research and publishing it in national and international scientific journals.
