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Discusses research related to the establish‐ment of technology parks in general, and in particular the technology park of King Mongkut’s University of Technology in Thailand. Uniquely in Thailand, this involved the university library, which gave rise to a number of key questions addressed in the project: Is there any role for the library in such a collaboration? What are the information needs and the information‐seeking behaviour of tenant staff members? What kind of information services could be offered to them? The main objective of the research was to develop a suitable model for a Thai university library in information provision to tenant firms in the first Thai technology park. This model, based on Australian data, was fine‐tuned to meet local Thai social and economic conditions.

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of the choice of database and data retrieval methods on the research performance of a number of selected Asian universities from 33 countries using two different indicators (publication volume and citation count) and three subject fields (energy, environment and materials) during the period 2005‐2009.

To determine the effect of the choice of database, Scopus and Web of Science databases were queried to retrieve the publications and citations of the top ten Asian universities in three subject fields. In ascertaining the effect of data retrieval methods, the authors proposed a new data retrieval method called Keyword‐based Data Retrieval (KDR), which uses relevant keywords identified by independent experts to retrieve publications and their citations of the top 30 Asian universities in the Environment field from the entire Scopus database. The results were then compared with those retrieved using the Conventional Data Retrieval (CDR) method.

The Asian university ranking order is strongly affected by the choice of database, indicator, and the data retrieval method used. The KDR method yields many more publications and citation counts than the CDR method, shows better understanding of the university ranking results, and retrieves publications and citations in source titles outside those classified by the database. Moreover the publications found by the KDR method have a multidisciplinary research focus.

The paper concludes that KDR is a more suitable methodology to retrieve data for measuring university research performance, particularly in an environment where universities are increasingly engaging in multidisciplinary research.