A PROUD MOMENT: Professor Dr Ooi Keng Boon receives the Malaysia’s Research Star Award (MRSA).

UCSI’S Faculty of Business and Information Science dean Professor Dr Ooi Keng Boon topped his list of awards and accolades by receiving the Malaysia’s Research Star Award (MRSA) by the Ministry of Education under the Top Peer Reviewer category from Clarivate Analytics.

Having recently received the 2018 Publons Peer Review Award in which he was listed among the World’s Top 1% of Reviewers in the field of 'Social Sciences, General', this new conferment truly reflects and embodies his ardent efforts and contributions to research in his field on a much grander scale.

Although being a reviewer is completely on a voluntary basis and generally there are no incentives given to reviewers, for Prof Ooi, being asked to review a research manuscript is widely regarded as a recognition of “peer esteem and prestige.”

“Personally and academically, I feel proud of this achievement as I was asked to review quite a number of research manuscripts by different editor-in-chiefs from various journals,”said Prof Ooi.

“I would like to thank UCSI for offering a great working culture in which my colleagues are extremely helpful in my busy daily tasks as a dean and therefore I could devote some of my time to complete the review tasks assigned to me,” he added.

“To FoBIS and UCSI as a whole, this award of mine, means that the IPTS could be on par with the IPTA in terms of research while we pursue teaching excellence at the same time.

“I always believe that being an academician excelling in teaching and research could be another possible career pathway for our students instead of working in the commercial lines, so I would also like to take this opportunity to encourage the students to consider this career pathway.”

The auspicious awards ceremony held at Hotel Sama Sama in Sepang was attended by Director-General of Higher Education, Datin Dr Siti Hamisah Tapsir , Secretary-General of the Ministry of Education, Dato’ Dr Mohd Gazali Abas and Clarivate Analytics Head of Australia and Southeast Asia vice president,  Jeroen Prinsen.

The awards ceremony saw a total of 32 Malaysian university researchers recognised by both Clarivate Analytics and Elsevier. The data used for conferring the awards was based on the citation of research articles published in journals indexed in WoS by Clarivate Analytics and Scopus by Elsevier.