The reason, of course, is that it takes time to do popular writing, and that’s time a researcher could spend producing research for a refereed journal.Īnd, of course, the same thing can be said for publication metrics for individual researchers, such as the h-index or one’s total number of citations. Rather, they’re based solely on publications in refereed journals, as well as technical books, refereed book chapters and refereed conference proceedings.įor the current rounds of the ERA, for example, the ARC lists over 24,000 eligible journals, but virtually every single one of them is aimed at a specialised academic audience, not at the general public.īy doing things this way, the government is actually creating a disincentive for researchers to do popular writing. Neither the ERA nor HERDC give any weight at all to popular writing or non-traditional scientific projects. The HERDC is very significant as it is the basis for allocating large government research-block grants to universities (these totalled A$1.77 billion in 2015).īut here’s the catch. Secondly, the ERA has a modest impact on research funding: universities with higher ERA scores get a slightly bigger slice of government research monies.īeyond the ERA, the federal Education Department also collects information on research productivity via its Higher Education Research Data Collection ( HERDC). At James Cook University, for instance, we are very proud of our five-star rating in Environmental Science and Management. Firstly, it is a key indicator of academic prestige. The ERA has two main impacts on a university. In the arts, humanities and social sciences, on the other hand, publications are evaluated by a comprehensive peer-review process. In sciences, engineering, medical and health research, ratings are largely determined by how frequently journal articles are cited relative to world benchmarks. The Australian Research Council gauges scientific research activity by universities via their Excellence for Research in Australia ( ERA) ratings.ĮRA scores range from 1 (bad) to 5 (excellent) and reflect the quality of publications a university produces in a particular field, such as Environmental Science and Management, Medical Microbiology or Geochemistry.
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