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Is Australia strong in environmental research?

Readers may at times wonder how smart we are in Australia when it comes to managing our environment. Leaving arguments over specific issues aside, if Australia wants to make good decisions, do we have the intelligence, based on strong research, to do so? This editorial considers how Australia performs in the national research quality assessment run by the Australian Research Council, called Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA). This independent and detailed process assesses research at Australian universities across all disciplines, known as ‘fields of research’, and assigns ratings as a measure of quality. We focus on the field of research (FoR) Environmental Science and Management. In universities around Australia, academics and senior management have just finalised their submissions for the all-important 2018 ERA assessment and will await the outcomes later this year with some nervousness. All ratings have their qualifications, but the ERA is widely regarded as robust and a good reflection of the quality of research in different disciplines in Australia, and of where we have larger or smaller collective capacity. It assesses Australian research against global standards. Such research quality and critical mass are crucial to our national social and economic prospects, in an increasingly knowledge-intensive world. We are told that brain has replaced brawn, and our research is as important as our natural resources. The innovative, agile and clever country must have both the quality and quantity of relevant research to prosper. To make a submission in a particular FoR or discipline, a university needs to have at least 50 research outputs (e.g. refereed journal articles, academic book chapters) over the five-year assessment period. This is an indicator of sufficient mass and activity to be considered serious. So, the number of Australian universities that can construct an ERA submission is a reasonable measure of national research capacity in that field. While there is some scope for fashioning a submission to consolidate a university’s quality work in selected disciplines, journals are coded according to the areas they cover. This, with close oversight of the assessment system, makes it difficult to ‘game’ the system, and universities will seek to avoid making submissions in weaker areas. The ERA then uses several measures to rate quality across a set of variables within each FoR, including research income, commercialisation, esteem measures (e.g. academy fellowships), and especially citations (the number of times a publication is cited in others). In the science FoR, where the environmental field sits, journal citations are the key. The more often a peer-reviewed journal article is cited by others around the world, the more significant and useful it is judged to be. The very sharp point of the ERA is the assignment of a 1–5 rating of quality, where 3 is ‘world standard’, 1 is seriously sub-standard and 5 is ‘well above world standard’. These ratings can delight and greatly assist a university in a given discipline (that is, getting a 5), or hurt them badly (that is, getting a 1). ‘World standard’ is possibly a misnomer and ‘world average’ is more accurate since the citation ratings show where a citation rate is in relation to world average for a discipline (FoR). A 3 is indeed a world average citation rate. This underlines the absurdity of some universities boasting of being ‘world standard’ since what it really says is they are mediocre, although ‘world standard’ does sound much better! We should take these indicators seriously, as a measure of Australia’s capacity to confront future challenges and embrace opportunities. Before looking at our capacity to confront the environment and sustainability challenges of the future via FoR Environmental Science and