This paper is an attempt to evaluate ASEAN universities’ research impact and more specifically that of Vietnam by analyzing research-oriented key performance indicators that drive rankings. According to data, these universities have large gaps between the average reputations for academia and employers, faculty-student ratios, and research output. The experiment’s three models named LSTM, GRU, and Hybrid predicted rankings on citation performance. The results revealed that the Hybrid model produces the highest accuracy, reiterating that the citation per paper variable tends to most strongly drive the positive correlation between citations per paper and university ranking. In addition, the study also indicated that Hue University cited 175% more research opened up to gain below a rank of 55. This point emphasized that research output is a major driver of rankings and institutional prestige. At the same time, the study offered several recommendations for universities, particularly those looking to increase their rankings, including focusing on high-impact publications, developing global research partnerships, and investing in faculty development.