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Despite several initiatives and policies that boost international‐indexed publishing, the outputs of social sciences in general and educational science of Vietnam in international academic databases such as Clarivate Web of Science (WoS) or Scopus are still modest. This study examined the factors affecting international‐indexed publishing among Vietnamese educational researchers. A framework for determining the influential factors was developed comprising three dimensions (policies, capacities, and networking) with 15 sub‐factors, and the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) model was employed to estimate the relative importance of these factors on international publishing. A survey of Vietnamese educational researchers at higher education and research institutes was undertaken, of which 80 returned validated answers, which after analysis were reduced to 49. The study revealed that the most important factors were collaboration with domestic and international peers and receiving support from research assistants or supervisors. A closer investigation revealed differences between senior and junior researchers regarding issues such as the accessibility of scientific documents, research data, and time for research. Key points: There are greater STEM than HSS outputs from Vietnam, although the growth of social science output is growing at a faster rate.Both senior and junior Vietnamese educational researchers agree that local and international networking is a major factor in successful publication within internationally indexed journals.Junior educational researchers identify available time for research as a major limiting factor in international publication where it is not identified as such by senior researchers.Capacity‐related factors for successful publication are perceived as less limiting than policy or networking factors among Vietnamese researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]