The performance of Australian science

Is Australia's scientific performance being watered down due to the pressures brought about by policy changes over a decade ago, or is it simply the case that university researchers are becoming much more clever in how they publish?

This is the question that arises in the wake of the publication of Monitoring Australia's Scientific Research, prepared by the ANU's Research Evaluation and Policy Project, and published by the Australian Academy of Science.

The book reports on the research resulting from an analysis of the Institute for Scientific Information citations rates covering the period 1981 through to 1999.

The main findings are that Australia's share of the major international scientific journal literature has increased significantly in the 1990s from 2.2% to nearly 2.8%. Author Linda Butler reports that much of the growth comes from Australia's university sector, and while the citation rate has increased in line with publications, it has not regained the ground lost in the second half of the 1980s.

As a result of the more recent findings Butler suggests that Australia's relative citation impact may have been adversely affected by the push to evaluate and fund research on the basis of publication output, with little reference to the quality of that output.