Excellence in Research Australia (ERA)

• ERA Preparations at UWS
  
• Key Dates
  
• ERA News
  
• ERA Background
  

ERA Preparations at UWS

The Office of Research Services is collating data for ERA 2010.

All items for ERA review will be available to reviewers via an ERA-only access version of the UWS Research Repository.

ERA Journal Rankings

Draft ranked journals listing are available from a site established by John Lamp at Deakin University.

The ARC has now released full journal list with journal titles (Excel, 3.38Mb) and ISSNs only (not ranked). The ARC will release the final Ranked Journal List for the ERA 2010 evaluation in early February 2010.

Journal rankings A*, A, B, C for the Trial clusters.

To request a journal be considered for inclusion use the new journal form (RTF, 1.93Mb) and send to era@arc.gov.au

For some disciplines, ranked conferences will be used as an indicator. See ARC list.

^ Back to top

Key Dates

The ERA trial census date is 31st March 2009 and the closing window for publications is 31st December 2008.

Submissions commence Tuesday, 1 June 2010.

^ Back to top

ERA News

SCOPUS is the citation provider for ERA.

In the ERA Trial, thirty-nine universities out of forty-one submitted data for Cluster One - Physical, Chemical and Earth Science.  More than 40,000 research outputs were submitted for this cluster.

All forty-one institutions submitted data for Cluster Two, which covers the Humanities and Creative Arts. More than 47,000 research outputs were submitted, including around 7,000 original creative works.

Trial outcomes are available at the ARC website.

The use of esteem measures is back for the full ERA review in 2010 and a consultation paper has been released on the proposed indicator matrices and esteem indicators ERA Indicators Consultation Paper.

Research Evaluation Committees

The ARC is currently considering expressions of interest from researchers to constitute the review committees.

^ Back to top

ERA Background

In February 2008, the Hon. Senator Kim Carr, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, announced the Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) initiative. The Australian Research Council (ARC) has assumed responsibility for ERA in consultation with the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). The ERA initiative is aimed at evaluating excellence in all areas of research, including pure and applied as well as industry collaborations, within the Australian higher education sector. It will seek to assess research quality using a combination of indicators and expert review by committees comprising experienced, internationally-recognised experts.

ERA will report by institution and by discipline those areas that are internationally competitive, together with emerging areas where there are opportunities for development and further investment.

ERA will use the new Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classification (ANZSRC) – Fields of Research (replacing RFCDs) as the primary tool for defining disciplines.  Further information on the ANZSRC may be obtained at the Australian Bureau of Statistics webpage.

UWS has participated in all aspects of the development of the ERA, including a pilot evaluation of the IT systems. In July draft ERA journal rankings were released and UWS provided feedback and recommended changes to 354 journals.

Quality will be determined by a combination of metrics and expert review by 8 discipline based expert panels.

More information is available from the Australian Research Council webpage.

^ Back to top