Australia's scientific research study

'Monitoring Australia's Scientific Research', written by Linda Butler, has just been released from the Research Evaluation and Policy Project at the Australian National University. It presents an analysis of the current state of Australian scientific research.

Butler highlights a number of notable trends in Australia:

• Australia's share of the major scientific journals indexed by the Institute for Scientific Information increased significantly in the 1990s from 2.2% to nearly 2.8%. While publication output is increasing at a greater rate than for many comparable countries, Australia's relative citation performance is falling behind.
• In 1988 Australia was ranked sixth on relative citation impact among the major publishing nations, but by 1999 had dropped to eleventh position. The increase in Australian publication output has been at the expense of impact.
• There are strong indications that Australia's relative citation impact is being adversely affected by the push in the university sector to evaluate research on the basis of publication counts, with little reference to the quality of that output. Academics are increasing their publication count, but this is occurring in journals with low international profiles.

The study provides important data on the relative research performance of Australia, and its major research sectors and institutions, in the different scientific disciplines. For the first time, it is possible to benchmark the performance of institutions using publication and citation data.

The study covers research in all sectors, from the universities and CSIRO to hospitals, medical research institutes and government agencies. It highlights the institutional locations of the journal articles that have the highest impact on the international research community.

Copies of the publication can be obtained here.