USM, PENANG, 12 April 2017 - Six authors from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) have been awarded the Emerald Literati Award 2016 by Emerald Publishing.

The USM Vice-Chancellor, Professor Datuk Dr. Asma Ismail said that the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for a university is the output of the research in the form of journal publications.

"In 2016, USM has published 2326 articles in various journals and USM is always pushing for more articles to be published as it is one of the country’s Research Universities," said Asma.

 According to the Business Manager, Emerald Publishing, Elvin Cheah there are 78 authors in the Emerald Publishing platform and six of them have been chosen to receive the award, where two of them won the award for Outstanding Paper and the four won the award for Highly Commended Paper.

The recipients of the awards are as follows:- 

Role Status	Authors	Article	Description
Highly Commended Paper	Professor Dato’ Dr. Ruhani binti Ali Graduate School of Business Dr. Anwar bin Allah Pitchay School of Management	Culture, corporate governance and analysts forecast in Malaysia	Asian Review of Accounting 2015 Vol 23(3)
Highly Commended Paper	Professor Dr. Mani Maran a/l Ratnam   School of Mechanical Engineering   Mohan Kumar Balasundaram School of Mechanical Engineering	Machine vision method for non-contact measurement of surface roughness of a rotating workpiece	Sensor Review 2015 Vol 35 (1)
Outstanding Paper	Associate Professor  Dr. Wong Wai Peng School of Management	Sustainable supply chain management: a closed-loop network hierarchical approach	Industrial Management & Data Systems 2015 Vol 115 (3)
Outstanding Paper	Dr Mehran Nejati  Graduate School of Business	A fuzzy approach to service quality diagnosis	Marketing Intelligence & Planning 2015 Vol 33 (1)

The winning criteria are:-

✓Contribution of something new to the body of knowledge either in terms of approach or subject matter

✓Writing has excellent structure and presentation

✓Well-written

✓Rigour in terms of argument or analysis

✓Relevance – to practice and conduct further research, in most cases

✓Up-to-date - demonstrating that the latest/key works in the field have been cited

✓Work which is clearly within the editorial scope and remit of the journal

✓Finally, the outstanding paper should have the ‘x-factor’ – something that makes it stand out from the rest and which the editor and EAB can recognize and define to the rest of us.

Also present were the USM Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation), Professor Dato’ Dr. Muhamad Jantan and Acting Chief Librarian, Engku Razifah Engku Chik.  

Text: Nor Rafizah Md Zain / Photo: Mohd Fairus Md Isa