Release Date 26 April 2021

For years, the National Central Library (NCL) has been carrying out important tasks such as acquiring and preserving critical academic resources from participating universities.

To promote the dissemination of research, the NCL held “the 2021 Taiwan Academic Resource Ceremony (110年臺灣學術資源影響力發布會)” on April 26, giving awards to colleges and universities that have more theses and dissertations (TDs) openly available to the public to download.

NKUST won first place in the number of authorized TDs full texts and the number of TDs full-text downloads, being ranked number one with the National Taipei University of Technology (Taipei Tech) in the overall ranking. President Yang, Ching-Yu, and Dean of Libraries Dr. Yang, Yuan-Jen were invited to receive the awards.

“This glory belongs to every hard-working graduate student and their advisors.”

“This glory belongs to every hard-working graduate student and their advisors. They made their works available to be downloaded and read online not only have promoted the publicness of knowledge in higher education but also had increased the discoverability and dissemination of Taiwan’s electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). We felt proud as a university to see the high acceptance of open access among our graduate students to facilitate ETDs research,” says President Yang.

The personnel from the NCL analyzed TDs, journals, and publications of a variety of academic fields that were electronically stored on the database. There were a total of 198 colleges and universities that won the awards.

According to the analysis of ETDs throughout the 2019 academic year, the top five research topics are the same as the previous year: deep learning, machine learning, service quality, convolutional neural network (CNN), and Internet of Things (IoT). 

Most of these research papers not just focused on a single topic, rather a combined study of deep learning, machine learning, CNN, or IoT with artificial intelligence (AI).

Also, NCL released the most searched keywords of research papers in 2019: education and children, which had been the trending topics, were back to the top list, presumably related to the recent low fertility rate; e-commerce related to recent consumer trends; the law jumped to the top for the first time.

The research topics about pandemic affecting consumer behavior were one of the most downloaded research papers. Other trending topics including food delivery platforms, online shopping, service quality, customer satisfaction and loyalty, education, and ethnic identity.

The Covid-19 pandemic and the U.S.-China trade war dominated the headlines across the nations and also became one of the most popular keywords for research papers.

Other popular keywords included big data, China, Taiwan, Japan, U.S, IoT, and corporate governance. AI, pandemic prevention, and U.S.-China relations would continue to be very popular topics for research papers.

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Translated by Jess Lin      Reviewed by Prof. Amy Tang