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MONITORING AUSTRALIA'S SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

Supporting data PDF file | RTF file Please direct any enquiries about the data to linda.butler@anu.edu.au.

Linda Butler’s monograph, Monitoring Australia’s Scientific Research, is an extensive analysis of selected aspects of Australia’s research performance. Butler’s scrutiny rests on bibliometric measures – the study of research publications and the impact they achieve in the international literature.

Using data from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI), Butler highlights a number of notable trends in Australia’s presence in the literature, for example:

• Australia’s share of the major scientific journals indexed by ISI increased significantly in the 1990s – from 2.2% to nearly 2.8%. Much of the driving force behind this increased publication share comes from the university sector;

• The relative impact of Australia’s publications continues to fall further behind most other comparable OECD countries;

• There are indications that Australia’s relative citation impact may have been adversely affected by the push to evaluate research on the basis of publication counts, with little reference to the quality of that output.

Butler’s study also 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 aligned with the standard fields of science.  When used in conjunction with other measures of esteem, performance, visibility and the testimony of expert peers, the data in the monograph provide a powerful additional tool for benchmarking research endeavour.