Successful International Visits to Dubai and Iran

The Accounting Research Institute thanks Professor Dato' Dr Mustaffa Zain and his team for their successful recent international visits to Dubai and Iran.  In Dubai, they attended the Global Academy of Training & Research (GATR) in collaboration with various National and International Universities and Publishers.  Themed "Contemporary Issues in Business And Social Sciences Research: A Dubai Initiative", ARI team managed to get their papers accepted for publication in several SCOPUS and ERA-indexed journals.  In Iran, the team visited two universities, namely Payam Noor University and Imam Reza University.  They were also invited to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Malaysian Embassy in Tehran.  The Education attache of the Iran Embassy in Malaysia will be organising memorandum of understanding between Universiti Teknologi MARA and Top 10 universities in Iran sometime in April 2017. Dato' Dr Mustaffa was heading the delegation comprising ARI fellows and associates and officers from several statutory bodies who are members of the Association of Malaysian Statutory Bodies (Persatuan Badan-Badan Berkanun Malaysia, PBBM).  The visit has received a  lot of attention from many Iran universities and other government agencies and there were reports of the visits that appeared in Iran's mainstream newspapers and television stations.  ARI also thank Dr Soheil Kaziman, our post-doctoral scholar who is from Iran.  He was responsible for arranging the logistics including places to visit and meetings with the right people in Iran.  Dr Soheil was a PhD student at the Faculty of Accountancy and stayed back to do his post-doctoral training at ARI.  Iran is also home to the Islamic Citation Centre (ISC).  In 2008, the 57 member countries of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) have approved the creation of an Islamic Citation Centre (ISC) to be based in Iran.  

Basically, the ISC will manage a Science Citation Index similar to that of Thomson Reuters Scientific, which will analyse research performance in Islamic countries with the aim of improving research output and impact. The index will rank Islamic countries' scientific publications, introduce quantitative and qualitative measures for journals, and produce analytical reports on the status of universities, research institutions and technology centres by looking at their research productivity, impact and excellence.  It is our aspiration that some of UiTM journals will be indexed with ISC.  Well done team, you have done us proud.