With the acceleration of the countries of the Middle East region in their move towards knowledge -based economies, building a solid research infrastructure has become an increasing necessity. While individual institutions continue to produce academic works, there is still an essential gap in the absence of the unified platforms that link researchers, verify the quality of research, and expand their impact across the border.
From this standpoint, the Emirates Research Center for Research and Studies, which was established in 2019, emerged as one of the branches of the Emirates Foundation for Science and Research, to offer an ambitious response represented in the consolidation of its location as an engineer for the research infrastructure in the region.
The center works as a comprehensive institution for publishing and academic indexing, as it supervises tight scientific magazines that cover the fields of business, medicine, engineering, social studies, and digital transformation, in addition to organizing international conferences.
Based on this basis, the center launched three strategic initiatives in June 2024.
The first was five specialized international conferences that dealt with linguistic intelligence, medicine, tolerance, social responsibility and sustainability.
The second initiative, it is the CitScholar platform, which is the first automated system to manage conferences and magazines in both Arabic and English, to address the challenge of limiting research service in Arabic. While the third initiative to establish the Gulf Association for researchers as the first body dedicated to the indexing of research in the region came, setting criteria that achieve integration with global services.
The essence of these initiatives is the innovation based on partnerships, especially in the field of integrating artificial intelligence techniques, as the center focused on cooperative projects that highlight the capabilities instead of just declaring internal transformation.
Among the most prominent of these initiatives is the joint project with the Arabic Language Academy in Sharjah: the historical lexicon of the Arabic -backed Arabic language, a platform that includes more than 20 million words that allow users to interact with historical linguistic data.
This project embodies the integration of research infrastructure experiences with the specialized capabilities of partners to generate practical solutions, providing a repetitive model, with plans to expand through additional partnerships at the regional and international levels.
These partnerships are compatible with the priorities of national development, as initiatives are framed within the UAE’s vision to make scientific research a major tool for enlightened decision -making. This position extends to the level of practical implementation, as the center describes its task as working as a “integrated virtual world, and this combination of vision and application creates a framework that harmonizes with the various categories of stakeholders.
By building an infrastructure that other institutions can benefit from, the Emirates Center is implementing a strategy with strong retinal effects. The more researchers use the Citscholar platform, the provision of research to the enlightened magazines from the center, and the participation in the conferences, the more comprehensive and reliable index.
This gives the center the ability to influence how to evaluate scientific outputs regionally, while highlighting opportunities for technology providers to develop artificial intelligence tools prepared for Arabic, enhancing the capabilities of platforms, and building appropriate research systems for regional contexts.
As for the broader research community, the Emirates Center model shows how institutions can invest partnerships to build infrastructure without the need for huge independent investments.
With the Middle East seeking to shift towards the knowledge economy in line with national visions such as “Emirates Centennial 2071”, this infrastructure becomes the cornerstone of the formation of research trends, quality, and global impact for future generations.
