Quality science makes Australia a lead player in the Asia-Pacific region

Despite funding uncertainties, Australia has ranked fourth in overall publishing output in 2014 for the Asia-Pacific region, according to the Nature Index 2015 Asia-Pacific.

The Nature Index is compiled by the Nature Publishing Group and measures how many research articles a nation has published.

The Asia-Pacific region contributed more than 25% of articles included in the Nature Index database in 2014.

Not surprisingly, China leads the way in the region and is second to the United States in the total number of papers published in 2014. Increased investment in research over the past decade is reflected in these results, with China the lead contributor in chemistry, physical sciences, and earth and environmental sciences.

Japan, South Korea, Australia, India, Singapore and Taiwan also made significant contributions in 2014 and were ranked in the world’s top 20.

Japan leads the region in life sciences, New Zealand is a leader in earth and environmental sciences and Singapore boasts one of the world’s highest numbers of scientists and engineering researchers per capita.

As well as looking at countries individually, the index examines interactions among them. For example, an assessment of collaborations within and outside the Asia-Pacific showed that scientists in the Asia-Pacific work together more often with researchers in other parts of the world than with those in their home region.

Australia and India have two of the highest rates of global collaboration amongst Asia-Pacific nations - with more than 80% of collaboration involving nations in other parts of the world.

Chemistry, the life sciences and physical sciences were Australia’s strengths, and the University of Queensland topped the research ranking with 392 published papers (108 weighted fractional count) in 2014, followed closely by Monash University.

Australia’s recent funding cuts are discussed in the editorial with reference made to a Fairfax Media analysis showing that Australian Government investment in research and development dropped to its lowest level since 1984 in 2014.

Government funding continues to support more than two-thirds of Australian researchers and this lack of growth in R&D investment has the potential to severely limit the sector’s growth.

A focus on promoting research outside of academia, developing breakthrough discoveries through interdisciplinary research and increasing international collaboration appears to have helped Australian ‘big’ science maintain its edge. As stated in the editorial, given domestic deficiencies, the appetite for international science partnerships is only likely to grow in 2015.

Articles included in Nature Index are drawn from 68 reputable science journals identified by researchers as where they would choose to publish their best work - these 68 journals are estimated to account for about 30% of total citations to natural science journals.

Nature Index uses three measures to track affiliation data for individuals:

• Article count (AC) - A country or institution is given an AC of 1 for each article that has at least one author from that country or institution. This is the case whether an article has one or a hundred authors, and it means that the same article can contribute to the AC of multiple countries or institutions.
• Fractional count (FC) - FC takes into account the relative contribution of each author to an article. The total FC available per paper is 1, and this is shared between all authors under the assumption that each contributed equally. For instance, a paper with 10 authors means that each author receives an FC of 0.1. For authors who have worked with joint affiliations, the individual FC is then split equally between each affiliation.
• Weighted fraction count (WFC) - This applies a weighting to the FC in order to adjust for the over-representation of papers from astronomy and astrophysics. The four journals in these disciplines publish about 50% of all papers in international journals in this field - approximately five times the equivalent figures for other fields. Therefore, although the data for astronomy and astrophysics are compiled in exactly the same way as for all other disciplines, articles from these journals are assigned one-fifth the weight of other articles.

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