VC’ s corner
For Australian universities, the consequences of a strong or weak performance are reputational rather than financial, as the total funding pool at risk is small. the graduate school structure as evidenced by higher degree completions. Both are embedded in national assessments of research and feed into perceptions of the standing of institutions. The citation data tells you something about the global visibility of research groups within the academic community. The completions of higher degrees are correlated with the volume of publications, the creation of intellectual property and measures of research collaboration with industry.
Leiden University’ s Centre for Science and Technology Studies produces a ranking that uses the number of publications in the Thomson’ s database and the proportion of these in the top 10 per cent of citations. When you adjust for the variation in the size of universities by taking into account the number of academics undertaking research, the overall institutional distribution of highly cited papers is remarkably similar in Australia and the UK; about 30 per cent of universities in both economies score 15 or more leading publications per 100 academics on contracts requiring research and teaching or research-only work.
The UK has seven universities with an index from Leiden greater than 30 – Imperial( 45), Cambridge( 45), London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine( 42), Oxford( 38), University College London( 36), University of Bristol( 34) and St Andrews( 31) – followed by a further 28 with a score of 15 or more. Here, Melbourne leads with an index of 41, followed by Queensland( 30), Sydney( 29), ANU( 27), Monash University( 26), UWA( 24), UNSW( 23), Adelaide( 21), Wollongong( 21), Macquarie( 19) and Newcastle( 15).
The story is different when we consider annual higher degree completion rates. Each year in the UK about one-third of universities generate 20 or more completions per 100 academics, including 15 universities that produce more than 30. Cambridge and Oxford approach 50 HDR completions per 100 academics a year. In Australia, however, current data shows that no institution has 30 or more completions. Only 11 have 20 or more completions, the University of Sydney leads the way with 28. In the UK, all of the Russell Group universities have indices of 20 or more. Only five of the Group of Eight meet this threshold, along with Macquarie( 27), Wollongong( 23), Queensland University of Technology( 23), Murdoch University( 21), USQ( 20) and the University of Tasmania( 20).
Since the creation of the unified systems in Australia and the UK, there has been little change to the institutions dominating their respective research systems. The existing research-led universities had access to good infrastructure and large cohorts of researchactive staff. At the same time, the broad philosophy of seeking research excellence wherever it is found has identified pockets of excellence across all universities but maintained concentration in the traditional powerhouses. Where Australia has drifted has been in the creation of high-quality graduate schools and the attraction of the best from around the world to study for research degrees. In the UK, about half of HDR registrations are international students and they are concentrated in leading research groups in a small portion of universities.
The scale of the graduate school system in the UK is closely linked to a broad range of indicators related to a vibrant innovation system, including knowledge exchange mechanisms, patent rates and research contracts with industry.
This comparison of the university systems in Australia and the UK suggests that the quality of research outputs is distributed in the same way. The research-led universities in both economies have similar levels of productivity per researcher. On the basis of these data it seems unlikely that further concentration of research grants would create a step-change improvement to either system. The bigger difference is in the performance of our graduate school activities and the relatively low rates of HDR completion per 100 academics. Here there is an argument to re-evaluate our support for HDR students, as higher numbers completing these degrees could help drive our national innovation system. n
Professor Paul Wellings is vice-chancellor of the University of Wollongong. campusreview. com. au | 19