The Sustainability of Graphene Research: A Novel Approach in Assessing the Role of Higher Education Policies in Developing Countries—The Case of Indonesia

The development of so-called advanced materials is mainly driven by research devoted to supporting industry and now expands to many issues such as energy demand, climate change, healthy awareness, and many others. However, the process of this material evolution is arguably slow in many developing countries, putting them far behind developed counterparts in terms of technological advancement. One of the advanced materials that absorbed global attention and can be adopted to assess research development is graphene. In this work, graphene-related publications of universities and research institutes were utilized to assess how effective the higher education policies of Indonesia, as a developing country, encourage graphene research development. For this purpose, a multidisciplinary perspective was used to comprehensively analyze the findings, highlighting the emerging gaps, orientation, and promising future research that will benefit many researchers, governments, and industries. A total of 667 filtered publications were investigated. In addition, VOSviewer was utilized as a proper complement to visualize and analyze the publication trend based on keywords and authorship. Many aspects were explored, including publication, distribution, collaboration, and policies. The investigation revealed that supportive governmental policies, especially Law No. 12 of 2012, in classifying the entity of universities, had a remarkable impact on the productivity and geographical distribution of graphene research publications. The most important finding, after analyzing 535 publications, showed that publications of graphene research increased dramatically and is centralized on Java Island. Moreover, it strongly indicates that most universities with the authority to self-budget can contribute significantly to advanced materials research. International collaboration with many countries was also strongly formed. By contributing 114 co-authorships, Malaysia was shown to be a favorite counterpart. Therefore, this study confirms that research activity can be utilized to assess the effectiveness of higher education policies. In a broader context, the advanced materials research publication is emerging as an indicator in revealing Indonesia’s socio-economic development. The trend of graphene research itself demonstrates the raising of developing countries’ awareness of global issues.